Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011)

★★★½
Brad Bird's hiring as the director of Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol signified a massive leap forward for the franchise. The previous installments were all solid entries in a series trending upward, but the fourth movie is a spectacular showcase of stunts and intricate plotting on a whole new level. Everything is bigger and better this time around. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt and looks completely at home as he's dangling outside the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. (I've been to Dubai. The building is a towering monster that casts a giant shadow over everything.) Bird so masterfully orchestrates the action and storytelling that he looks like he's been directing live-action for years, even though this is his first such project after his animated efforts The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Whatever hunch Tom Cruise and producer J.J. Abrams had about Bird paid off.

The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

★
The Pope's Exorcist is a clunky and unimpressive exorcism movie that looks good but does nothing new in its presentation of a possessed child who speaks with a gravelly voice. I grew impatient as every minute passed. I started thinking of better movies in this genre, and if that's what I'm doing in the first 20 minutes, then that is because this movie kept falling short of even the most modest of expectations. It features frights, screeches, levitations, superhuman strength and even necks that twist around. If Linda Blair watched this, she couldn't be faulted if she stood up proud and took a bow before everyone around her and declared that she did it better. Even the puke scene was derivative, although it wasn't pea soup this time but blood. I suppose director Julius Avery had to draw the line somewhere with the nods to 1973's The Exorcist, but the inclusion of ghostly writing on a child's belly makes me wonder if anyone—anyone—during preproduction meetings asked if there were too many similarities with William Friedkin's iconic horror show. There's even a freakin' spider walk.

Natasha (2007)

★
There is a good idea buried in this mess of a movie, which is directed with incompetence and scored like a lurid soap opera. It's equal parts Russian gangster movie and erotic thriller, but their convergence is a sloppy concoction to such an extent that both elements suffer. Scenes were left in that should have been reshot, while the budget confined the action to such an extent that a family greets a Russian foreign exchange student at a train station in an English village instead of a major airport in London because shooting at Heathrow would have been more expensive, therefore expecting a teenager who speaks broken English to know how to get off a plane, take the tube and eventually hop on a train to the countryside without getting lost. Natasha is bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment.

Jules (2023)

★★★½
When I read the premise for Jules, I imagined a fictionalized version of the story of a supposed U.F.O. that crashed in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania in 1965. I learned of the incident in a 1990 episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which I watched while growing up in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and it was kind of cool to see that such an event occurred in our part of the state. Maybe writer Gavin Steckler set his story for Jules in a fictional Western PA community (Boonton) because of the Kecksburg incident. As I watched the movie, I quickly realized that this was not a story of cover ups and mysterious government agents in radiation suits who take over a town and silence everyone under threat of violence. Instead, this is a surprisingly gentle tale that examines the difficulties of old age and its effects on the family. At one point I began to search for parallels with Ron Howard's Cocoon, but there were none. This is its own story, and director Marc Turtletaub tells it beautifully.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)

★★★½
I don't remember when exactly I watched Pee-wee's Big Adventure for the first time. It was on H.B.O. a year or two after the 1985 theatrical release, which came and went unnoticed for me. I did watch his H.B.O. special The Pee-wee Herman Show beforehand, so I was familiar with the character. The adult humor went over my head (Jambi upon receiving hands: "I've had something I've wanted to do for a long time"), but I was struck by the imaginative set design, quirky humor and colorful characters. Growing up, I envisioned Pee-wee Herman as children's entertainment, but his appeal never wavered upon adulthood. Pee-wee's longevity speaks to the child in all of us or a part of us that is tethered to more innocent times. Children love the bright colors and goofy antics, but adults can appreciate the surreal humor and artistic merit of Pee-wee's world. The actor who created the character, Paul Reubens, worked tirelessly for years to maintain the aura of this innocent man-child with an undefinable age. He gave interviews in character. The mystery was part of the presentation.