Havana, December 2014. A director is looking for a leading actress to play Stella in a Cuban adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire” when the announcement that Cuba and the United States are restoring diplomatic relations irrupts into the ordinarily weightless everyday lives of a group of actors getting ready for the casting.
Armed with a $400M budget and Tom Cruise’s death-defying stunts, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning delivers pulse-pounding action even as its plot falters. From underwater silence to high-altitude madness, it's pure adrenaline powered by old-school movie magic — but is this really Ethan Hunt’s final mission?
These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.
Pressure is an unambiguously great movie, lead by convincing performances, a well-crafted script, good direction, and at least some social awareness.
Shudder makes an incredibly atmospheric docuseries about the darker side of Hollywood mysteries.
The film's Incluvie rating is off the charts. It features Black, Muslim, queer, trans humans whose moms hold them up, fight for them, and love them for who they are...making anything possible.
