Earlier this month, the father of a wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneur was abducted in Paris while walking his dog. The attackers, wearing balaclavas, forced him into a van, later severing one of his fingers and sending a video of the mutilation to his son alongside a demand for millions of euros in ransom. The incident joined a growing list of violent crimes in France linked to crypto wealth. Victims have included a prominent entrepreneur and his wife who were held hostage, a man doused in petrol, and a child targeted in an attempted abduction. As fear spreads within France’s crypto community, some industry figures are accusing the EU’s landmark digital asset regulations of exposing holders to greater risk. Their concerns centre on the transparency requirements, which could make it easier to track down crypto owners. However, other insiders argue that the EU rules make a convenient scapegoat. Stanislas Barthélemi, president of the French crypto lobbying group ADAN, told the New York Times this week that the rules may inadvertently have put holders in danger. By creating a traceable digital footprint, he said, criminals could potentially monitor blockchain activity to identify wealthy targets. Alexandre Stachchenko, director of strategy at French crypto exchange Paymium, echoed the concern. He said the industry “wants to be discrete and anonymous,” but EU law “tells us it’s criminal.” Register Now Yet others in the industry dispute the claim that the EU’s regulations have played a role in the surge in attacks. ‘Strategic deflection’ Marit Rødevand, CEO & co-founder of Norwegian anti-money laundering firm Strise, said there was “little evidence” of a connection between the union’s rules and crypto kidnappings.  “While it is easy for champions of crypto to postulate that the increased physical attacks on those operating in the space are a product of regulations, this is both reductive and a strategic deflection away from legitimate security concerns,” she said. According to Rødevand, it is just as likely that information about potential targets was accessed through hacks, social media exposure, or publicity. Many crypto entrepreneurs are also prominent influencers.  Christopher Whitehouse, a crypto expert and solicitor at London-based law firm RPC, also made no connection. Instead, he said those holding high amounts of cryptocurrency were “obvious targets.” “The recent surge in crypto-motivated kidnappings in France is alarming but not surprising,” Whitehouse told TNW.  He noted that cryptocurrencies have several features that make them attractive for ransom. They can be transferred instantly, are difficult to trace if moved by sophisticated criminals, and lack the safeguards of traditional bank accounts. Traditional currency, in contrast, can be tracked via serial numbers.  Exploiting human vulnerability The recent violence in France, while brutal, is also not anything new. According to data compiled by crypto security advocate Jameson Lopp, over 200 physical attacks against Bitcoin and cryptocurrency holders have been reported since 2014. Some have been fatal.   Matt Green, head of blockchain technology disputes at London law firm Lawrence Stephens, contends that the violence boils down to criminals exploiting the weakest link in the crypto chain: people.    “The only thing stopping criminals [from] gaining access is human error or force, so kidnapping aims to break down the integrity of that human-led security,” he told TNW. To protect themselves, some high-wealth crypto holders have beefed up their personal security, including hiring bodyguards.  Green suggests another layer of protection: multisignature wallets, a type of crypto wallet that requires multiple users to perform certain tasks, such as making transfers.  Just as some shops display signs saying no cash is kept on premises, crypto holders would do well to make it clear that a single individual cannot access funds, Green said. Story by Siôn Geschwindt Siôn is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy. From nuclear fusion breakthroughs to electric vehic (show all) Siôn is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy. From nuclear fusion breakthroughs to electric vehicles, he's happiest sourcing a scoop, investigating the impact of emerging technologies, and even putting them to the test. He has five years of journalism experience and holds a dual degree in media and environmental science from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. When he's not writing, you can probably find Siôn out hiking, surfing, playing the drums or catering to his moderate caffeine addiction. You can contact him at: sion.geschwindt [at] protonmail [dot] com Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

BUTTPEACH Quantum Witch is a story of religious oppression, queer emancipation, and a dancing skeleton that hopes to popularise the ‘plotformer’ genre We spoke to Quantum Witch’s lone developer – NikkiJay – about how her experiences as part of a religious cult shaped the development of her game, an 80s-style ‘plotformer’ about finding your lost flock of faer. Image credit: NikkiJay Article by Kelsey Raynor Guides Writer Published on May 29, 2025 You might not have heard of Quantum Witch, but if you’ve an affinity for pixel-art platformers with engaging story-beats, meta-narratives, and an array of kooky characters, then you should be all over it. To just call Quantum Witch a colourful platformer with a strong narrative (read: ‘plotformer’) is to do it a disservice, though. Quantum Witch is so much more than its vibrant pixels; it is NikkiJay’s personal story of fleeing a religious cult, embracing her LGBTQ+ identity, and seeking solace in video games. There’s a dark undercurrent, but ultimately, Nikki chooses to tell her story – and a story that many others will no doubt see themselves in – with humour and pride. To get a better idea of exactly what informed Quantum Witch and how the indie ‘plotformer’ came together, VG247 sat down with NikkiJay to ask how growing up in a religious cult led to the development of the game and what she hopes audiences will get from it. The below interview discusses religious trauma, coercive control, and the abuse of power. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. VG247: I’m aware that Quantum Witch is largely informed by your own personal experiences of fleeing a religious cult; would you mind sharing some more about your experience, and how it has informed Quantum Witch’s story and characters? Nikki: I was born into the group and my family on both sides were third generation. Age 10, I needed my tonsils out and I had to tell the surgeon that I would rather die than accept certain medical treatments. As a 10-year-old, it's one of the questions they ask when you go for CPTSD diagnosis: “did you at any point honestly really believe you were going to die?” Yeah, I was told I had to be prepared for that. I had to die for God if that was the option that was presented to me. Either take this medical treatment that God said I couldn't have or die. I had to choose death. This cult literally kills kids for God. A lot of people stayed because the alternative was to lose your entire support structure and social network. You were literally by yourself with nothing, which was the option I chose in the end. It’s high coercive control. This way, they say that you have the personality God wants you to have. Religious control and abuse of that power is the biggest theme that made it into Quantum Witch. It is very much again about urgency and choice: I think if people have been through similar things, it's going to resonate with them. VG247: During the demo, I got the impression that Ren is largely not interested in the religious beliefs shared with her by others in Quantum Witch, but she still appears to have a fascination with the Old Gods. I have two questions about this: is Ren on the fence, so to speak, about her beliefs? Does this align with any of your thoughts and feelings about religion now? Nikki: Yeah, I am agnostic. I am a skeptic. I have to be open to the possibilities. A skeptic who isn't open to possibilities isn’t a skeptic. They're a cynic, and Ren is very much a skeptic. The majority of the characters in the game are just aspects of me that I've made into a character, it's just a little piece of me that I've enhanced without turning it into a stereotype as far as I can. Tyra [Ren’s partner] is more cynical: ‘come on, it's nonsense’. And Ren’s like, ‘no, let's go find out’. Her desire to go explore is going to lead her into things that she shouldn't have explored in the way that she's going to. But yeah, she is definitely that part of me who would like for there to be magic. Image credit: NikkiJay VG247: Quantum Witch’s marketplace – which features unnamed characters that bear uncanny resemblances to some iconic video game mascots – is what I assume to be a representation of some of your favourite games. The game itself regularly reminded me of themes and mechanics from Undertale, The Binding of Isaac, and even Stardew Valley. What other games or pieces of media helped inspire Quantum Witch, and how? Nikki: I love Undertale. What I loved about Undertale is the mixture of all those styles and then you'd be talking to a character and suddenly you have to play a really fast reaction game. I can't do that. I'm too old. But it was a big inspiration in the style of game I wanted to create. As for the reason why the video game characters are there in the plot of [Quantum Witch’s] story; they do tie into the plot and there's a little hint that they say. And I just loved putting in my alternate takes on who these characters were. You might know Paul Rose from Digitizer. At the very beginning of the project, I had all my story beats worked out. This is what's going to happen. This is how it's all going to interact, but I could not – for the life of me – start it. I couldn't build the bridges between these beats and Rose helped me a lot. He did a script treatment and some of the dialogue in the marketplace is directly from him; [one of the characters you meet is] talking about pills and I was like, ‘that that just fits in perfectly because there is a character later on who might need that pill’. It’s also a bit of a cue for me to have the characters talk about medication. . I also wanted to add some queer flavor to them, so Princess Nectarine – who is similar to but legally distinct from a certain Nintendo character – is in a polycule with Bowser and Mario and they like to roleplay kidnapping. I did not set out to make a queer game. It's turned out that way because I can't help it, but it's not all these characters are. VG247: I know you’re a solo developer and this is a largely solo project, but I’m aware you’ve received some help with the whole endeavour. You mentioned Paul Rose. So could you tell me more about the people who have helped you with creating Quantum Witch and what they did? Nikki: I must absolutely shout out Jerden Cooke for the music. We composed a lot of it together, [with] me mostly on the ukulele which you can hear in Ren's theme. I don't know if you've seen the video clip of David Lynch helping compose Laura's Theme from Twin Peaks. Working with him is like that. I got some fantastic music which was like the music I could hear in my head when I started playing on the ukulele. He was able to put it down, basically extract it from my head, and put it into a word file. And Paul Rose; I knew him through Digitizer meetups. We just got talking on Twitter one day and met up. He's a great guy and things came about quite naturally because it was when Covid hit and a lot of TV work got cancelled. I said to him, look, you should get yourself on Fiverr. Put your writing services out there because people should be paying for this. I will be your first customer, and so I was! Without his help, this would have still been a collection of little story beats that I would have had no idea how to wire together. And I've always wanted to work with Stephanie Sterling. What if I just ping her on Bluesky and say, "Hey, want to write a chapter of this game? It's got a dancing skeleton in it." She said, "Yeah, I'm in." She said that when she started to do it, she wasn't entirely sure whether it would be the right project because she just saw a [dancing] skeleton. The more she wrote for [Quantum Witch] and the more she played the game, she went, "Yeah, this is my wheelhouse,” and she poured her religious trauma into it, which happened to just fit absolutely perfectly. It's like I could not have asked for a better group of people to work with, and this is kind of what I want to say to indie developers who are solo. You're not alone. You might just want one name on the credit, but it takes a village to raise a child. Image credit: NikkiJay VG247: I was taken aback by just how cosy the game is. Admittedly, even with the subject matter, I didn’t expect – largely given the art style – for this to be all doom and gloom, but I definitely didn’t expect something so jovial and honestly, straight-up funny. How did you decide that this was the approach you wanted to take when creating Ren’s story? Nikki: [Stardew Valley], Chrono Trigger and Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door are my three most played games. I love the style of Stardew Valley and I love that there's some darkness hidden in Stardew Valley. I really liked the humor in it. I mean, if you thought I shouldn't be laughing at this, but I am, then that’s an achievement. That's exactly what I wanted. My main coping mechanism is humor. I'm not saying it's a healthy coping mechanism, but it kind of works. And I mean, I was heavily influenced by reading a lot of Douglas Adams. and he was able to find humor in the most bleak situations. And the graphical style… When I started this, I couldn't draw a convincing stick figure. I look at the art that I did four years ago when I started messing about with this idea and it's just embarrassing. Objectively terrible, but my main influences were Stardew Valley and The Darkside Detective. I loved the low-resolution style art, but there was so much character in them. So, I took a pixel art course on Udemy and a color theory course and… then just found, hey, I can do this now. That's weird. VG247: While looking into Quantum Witch and yourself, I found a lovely quote of yours from The Guardian: “A lot of religion is about giving up autonomy to some mystical power that you’ve never seen, heard or met. Over the course of the game, Ren takes that agency back… It’s a queer emancipation story.” Could you expand on this? Nikki: The consequence of being yourself in a group that says ‘no, being yourself is wrong’ is that you just get thrown out. It's weird because I think of my experiences as unique, but the themes they really do seem to be universal. Stephanie Sterling from The Jimquisition: she wrote a chapter of the later part of the game. I originally said to her, can you write these three scenes? She came back and said “I couldn't stop writing. I just love this universe” It's weird, because you wouldn't know it was a different author. The religious oppression of queer people is the same wherever you go. I'm really hoping just that I've got that balance right between a game that's fun and cozy and humorous, – that there is a dancing skeleton who can see through time – but also has that deeper meaning and that message that you take back control. A lot of people would look at this and think ‘you must be anti-religion’ and I'm 100% for freedom of religion, but that also means I'm 100% for freedom from religion. Whether you've got faith or not, nobody wants somebody else's faith forced on you. You can't have freedom of religion without freedom from religion. Image credit: NikkiJay VG247: How long is Quantum Witch set to be, and how many endings will there be? I know you also mentioned some side quests having various conclusions, as well as the game’s main endings being different depending on your decisions. Nikki: I watched a tester play from beginning to end. It took him about three and a half hours, and he got my second favorite ending. He had questions about the lore and I said, "play it again and make different choices, and you'll get a different ending, which will probably answer that for you." It's difficult to say how many endings there are. There's three definite categories of endings. There's bleak. There's interesting, where you kind of get a bittersweet ending, and then there's the super happy ending, and there are variations on each of those. [These depend] on the characters you've helped. There's also little puzzles that you can go and solve which can enhance the happy ending. It's kind of like an open-world choose-your-own adventure book, but in pixel format. If I'm going to do a full playthrough of all choices and all stories, I will easily put aside six or seven hours to do it and I wrote it. So, I'm not trying to discover it. I think it's like The Stanley Parable in that sense. VG247: I also learned that Quantum Witch could have been a novel. It could have initially started out that way and you then obviously decided to turn this into a game. How did that come about? Nikki: One of my friends was doing the National Novel Writing November. I thought, I've got this story in my head which might fit, so I started writing it. I don't know if anybody's realized this, [but video games] are quite difficult to make, and novels are very easy because you just type... I was wrong and I really did not enjoy writing it. I decided, thinking back on my childhood, I want to make this into a game. I want to make this interactive. Choice is a big theme. I want to give the player a choice. And it did end up as a point and click [game] for a while, rather than a plotformer. No matter what you do, it is a valid choice. There are no game over screens in Quantum Witch. Anything you do is just a part of the story and the game is over when you get the credits. Quantum Witch is a surprisingly cosy and jovial take on topics of religious trauma and queer identities, but if your curiosity about this game is piqued, it’s up to you to find out all of its secrets. NikkiJay stresses that there’s so much to discover for those who are eager to explore the game and discover all of its various paths, endings, and dialogue. For those who want to try Quantum Witch out, you can find a demo for the game on Steam, and it’ll also be participating in Steam’s Next Fest during June.

Spoilers for “Wish World.” Even the most daring artists, those that actively seek reinvention on a regular basis, will eventually wind up repeating themselves. If they’re lucky and self-aware, the artist may even get the chance to rehabilitate some of the lesser works in their canon. Sadly, it’s at this last hurdle that Russell T. Davies has fallen, with “Wish World” not quite able to do more than become a bizarro remake of “The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords.” James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf We open in Bavaria, 1865, where a cloak-wearing woman on horseback rides through a forest to a remote cabin. It’s classic series villain the Rani, resurrected at the end of last week’s episode, who is greeted by Otto Zufall (German for “coincidence”), a storybook villager-type who expected to greet a midwife to help his ailing wife, Violett. Otto is the seventh son of a seventh son, who has just welcomed his seventh son into the world. Violet lays in bed cradling the newborn, which the Rani says is — as the third-generation seventh son — gifted with unbelievable power. She plucks the newborn from her arms, killing Violet by blowing on her, turning her into a pile of violet petals. She then blows on the other six children and turns them into ducks, and Otto into a wise owl. Then, we’re on Earth on May 23, 2025, where the happily married couple John Smith — the Doctor — and Belinda wake up side by side in bed. Their daughter, Poppy (from “Space Babies” and “The Story and the Engine”) pads in from her bedroom. The trio live as a picture of domestic bliss, with a distinctly fake-looking ‘60s style kitchen filled with bright colors. It may be the present day, but there’s little-to-no tech on show except that every room has a 14-inch CRT TV that only plays a broadcast of Conrad (from “Lucky Day”) who tells them the whole world is going to have great weather that day. At breakfast, the Doctor’s mind wanders for a moment, and suddenly his mug (which was in the middle of the table) inexplicably smashes to the floor. Never mind, as there’s a whole cupboard of matching mugs to replace the ones that fall during a “slip.” Each house even has a large, bright orange trash can just to get rid of the mugs that fall during a “slip”, including their next door neighbor, Mel. When the Doctor greets Mel, he asks what her plans are for May Day, and she says as an unmarried woman with no children, she’ll just sit inside in quiet contemplation. Looming over the heart of the city, taller than any skyscraper, is a structure made out of bone that stands tall on spindly spider legs. Similarly incongruous is a series of massive, dinosaur skeletons that stomp around the landscape. We’ll see later that the dinosaur skeletons don’t actually interact with the world around them, phasing through the space below. The only person (for now) that doesn’t seem to be affected is Ruby, who turns up at the Doctor’s house. She thinks she knows the Doctor, and Belinda, but can’t quite work anything out, and then blurts out that they don’t have a child when she sees Poppy. That prompts Belinda to call the police, as having doubt or sowing confusion is a crime here. The Doctor heads to work in UNIT HQ, suitably redecorated as a 1950s office despite the sci-fi trappings in the periphery. Kate Stewart is an officious boss, Colonel Ibrahim is the Doctor’s colleague and Susan Triad has been turned into the ‘60s tea-lady from “The Devil’s Chord.” Colonel Ibrahim still has the hots for Kate, but thinks that she’s so far out of his league that she’d never go out with him. The Doctor disagrees, saying that Ibrahim is a “beautiful” man, which prompts Ibrahim to get very angry. After all, it would be wrong, impossible or deviant for a man to find another man beautiful, even intellectually. But the Doctor manages to avoid having him call the secret police as the staff of the office all stop to spot the Rani flying by on her hover scooter, which they believe is a sign of good luck for May Day the following day (another deliberate incongruity given May Day takes place on May 1). The Rani lands on the spider skeleton / looming tower of doom, handing Mrs. Flood some Italian meat and tells her to make Conrad a sandwich. He’s up in the tower, as it’s his imagination that is shaping the world, with his regular broadcasts informing the people of his choices. But he’s also nervous — saying that the effort of maintaining a world is difficult since he has to run so many complex systems or else let whole nations be destroyed. It may be his imagination, but it’s being powered by the nameless baby from 1865, who never cries, just smiles. Conrad, being the show’s avatar of so many alt-right figures, has built a reality to reflect his worldview. Heterosexuality is compulsory and loudly and rigidly enforced, there is a secret police ready to seize anyone off the street at a moment’s notice and everyone is constantly asked to inform on their family members. The culture of paranoia is rife. It also explains why Mel, as an unmarried and child-free woman, is expected to sit away and quietly contemplate her implicitly-poor choices, because naturally Conrad only values women for their utility, birthing and taking care of men, rather than as people with their own agency. Even Mrs. Flood, a Time Lady in her own right and the architect of this whole scheme, is relegated to the thankless role of “mother.” James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf His regular broadcasts are even used to taunt the Doctor, reading a story about the Doctor from a book that apes the original British Harry Potter covers. It is, without a doubt, intentional that Davies’ would make his alt-right villain a fan of the series in 2025. Meanwhile, Belinda remains at home looking after Poppy, and gets a visit from her mum and grandmother. They are talking about motherhood, and the fact Poppy is expected to grow up and become an obedient wife to her husband. But when Belinda’s grandmother asks how long Belinda’s labor took, she can’t remember — prompting a small crisis of her own. There’s one UNIT regular who isn’t up in the office, Shirley Bingham, who is in a wheelchair begging out on the street. Conrad’s worldview has no room for people with disabilities (or queer and gender non-conforming people) and so she’s homeless. Ruby initially brushes her pleas for money away before stopping and realizing that she’s met them before. Ruby is taken to a hidden homeless encampment where the ignored have gathered to create some sort of community. Ruby explains to them what they already know — something about all of this is wrong, and that she’s lived through 2025 already (during “73 Yards”) and it didn’t play out like this. Shirley has a plan to bring down Conrad, and Ruby wants in, saying that if she can get face to face with him, she’ll be able to remember what’s locked in the back of her mind. That night, the Doctor is at home, furrowing his brow, and in the background Susan appears on his TV in a brief flash. But she quickly disappears, only to be replaced by Rogue (Jonathan Groff, from last season’s “Rogue”) who only has time to tell the Doctor two things. First, “tables don’t do that,” and that he loves him. Belinda wakes up to the sound of mugs smashing, as the Doctor experiments — every time he feels doubt, a mug falls through the solid wood onto the floor. Belinda can see what’s going on, but is horrified enough to call the police and get them to arrest the Doctor for having doubts. But Mrs. Flood doesn't just arrest the Doctor, she hauls Belinda’s mom there to look after Poppy so Belinda can be arrested too. Shirley and Ruby are camped out below the stone tower, and Shirley pulls out a UNIT tablet that’s a relic from the old world. Up in the tower, the Doctor and Belinda are pushed over a threshold and into the safety of the Rani’s lair. But the pair still don’t have their memories, and so are confused when the Rani starts expositing at them, at length. She points out the seal of Rassilon, and asks if that jogs his memory to no avail, similarly her robot assistants that are looking for signs of doubt among the population. The Rani even dances under a disco ball to a dumbfounded Doctor, who just pleads for mercy. The Rani explains, in a way that made no sense to me at least, that all of the villains the Doctor ever faced wanted death, but her, who wants life. She somehow survived all the various destructions of Gallifrey and is now looking for a lost soul in the heretofore unknown “underverse.” She achieved this by, uh, blocking the Doctor’s route back to Earth and instead, forcing him to criss-cross around the universe with the Vindicator. Each reading the machine took was, in fact, creating a universe-wide network of power all feeding back to the Earth. As the Doctor’s memory returns, the Rani explains that being trapped in Conrad’s reality was to create and foster doubt. Much in the same way a human being’s doubt can damage their world, a Time Lord’s doubt should be enough to crack open the universe. As the clock ticks closer to midnight, she sends Belinda back outside the bone tower to her doom. Then, the Rani locks the Doctor on the bone tower’s balcony to witness as London is swallowed by a series of enormous black voids with only remnants emerging from the other side (such as the burned Black Cab at the end of “The Robot Revolution”). Why? Because the lost soul, trapped in the “underverse” she’s desperate to reach, is Omega. The Doctor, trapped on the balcony, tries to break back into the tower and stop the Rani but it’s too late. She has laid explosive charges and when they blow, the balcony tumbles down toward the void beneath. But the Doctor screams, “Poppy is real! Don’t you know what that means?” as he tumbles into the darkness. To. Be. Continued. “Tables don’t do that.” James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf If there’s one thing Russell T. Davies doesn’t do well, it’s narrative coherence in the run-up to his big finales. Problems and solutions are equally contrived, pulled out of left field and generally don’t stand up to much scrutiny. In his mind that’s okay because what interests him is the emotional resonance and character moments created by that drama. Given he’s one of the few name brand writers in the UK, it’s not as if this approach hasn’t been enormously successful. But it does make “Wish World” a frustrating beast since it is, as usual, playing with so many good ideas it squanders most of them. That wouldn’t be so bad, but for the episode’s conclusion being handed over to incoherent technobabble. It doesn’t help this is the second series in a row that hinges on the audience recognizing the significance of a villain not properly* seen on screen for more than four decades. It’s worth looking at the first two thirds separate from the last, since there’s so much good stuff early on. One of Davies’ usual fixations is on the rise of middle-class British fascism, and the moments when we’re just inhabiting Conrad’s world are wonderful. This time, it’s centered on the stultifying environment for the so-called “respectable types,” whose position and status are perpetually tenuous. The paranoia that manifests out of that means everyone is looking for signs of deviance in their own communities. Those deemed unfit, especially people with disabilities and queer folks, are rendered as un-persons, invisible, shunned and isolated. “Wish World” picks up on another recurring theme in the show, which is to ask what happens after the war has ended. Conrad’s utopia may have lovely weather, but everyone is dressed in uncomfortable clothes and at perpetual risk of being kidnapped off the street by police. If I have a nitpick (and I do) it’s that I wish we hadn’t needed to see the Rani’s baby kidnapping in the opener. Starting with the Doctor and Belinda waking up as a married couple would have been a bigger shock. And it’s a shame the episode can’t commit hard enough to the “we’re trapped in a bizarro world” bit as Ruby turns up so quickly to let the audience know Things Are Awry. Imagine if the first twenty minutes had played out just from John Smith, or Belinda, or Ruby’s perspective and the creeping horror as they realized what was wrong. Sadly, it’s the usual problem of having maybe 30 minutes at most to gesture to those ideas rather than explore them. Because we then have to stop the episode to get Ncuti Gatwa to look perplexed while the Rani spouts nonsense at him. Her evil plan doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny even as we're being told it. After all, why does she need the Doctor to leap between planets when she has her own TARDIS? And if all it takes is a Time Lord’s doubt to rip open the universe, she could have easily done that herself. It’s not as if the Doctor is affected by the doubt since he’s able to carry on until the Rani explodes the balcony and casts him into the void. Oh, there’s one thing that’s good in those last moments — the scene of the Doctor realizing something about Poppy is a nice hook into the finale. James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf I don’t get why the Rani would be motivated to go looking for Omega, the scientist who helped co-found Time Lord society. If Rassilon was the political mind, Omega was the engineer who created the power to make it all happen. He created the stellar manipulator that put a stable black hole at the heart of Gallifrey — the Eye of Harmony — to power its TARDISes. Omega’s backstory was flimsy in his two televised appearances, essentially being an overpowered villain for the Doctor(s) to battle in two different anniversary specials, “The Three Doctors” and “Arc of Infinity.” The rest of his backstory was filled out in the spin-off material, but he’s essentially just a big name baddie trotted out when, say, the Master wouldn’t cut it. There are thematic parallels between Omega and Conrad, however, since Omega’s antimatter universe was sustained entirely by his will and imagination. Is that a comment on something, or just a nice way of dovetailing toward Omega. Who knows? I’m not sure I do. It’s hard not to notice the extreme similarities between “Wish World” and “The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords,” including the fact both stories got started in the previous episode. For a start, there’s the whole Britain-under fascism angle, with the Doctor incapacitated by the villain. Not to mention both feature a sequence in which a Gallifreyan foe taunts our hero with a high camp dancing sequence in a room hovering above the sky. If there’s a shame, it’s that while the runtime has been cut in half, the actual quality of the denouement seems to have gotten worse. Oh, it was nice to see the seal of the Prydonian Chapter of the Time Lords of Gallifrey Seal of Rassilon on the wall of the Rani’s HQ. The bronze and red stylings looked gorgeous and while I’m never going to bang on about fan service in production design, it was lovely to see. And wasn’t it nice to get a bone structure hovering over London which is an unintentional callback to “The Ancestor Cell.” Just a shame that you’re then reminded that the book was designed to burn all the great ideas created by Lawrence Miles out of Doctor Who. After all, Miles has been at times the most interesting writer the series’ leadership refused to engage with. * Yes, I know Omega and Rassilon are standing beside Tecteun in “The Timeless Children.” This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/doctor-who-wish-world-review-the-last-of-the-time-lords-redux-183004744.html?src=rss

After spending several months doing not much besides watching Tom Cruise movies, I now spend a lot of time wondering about Tom Cruise running. The Mission: Impossible star is a high-cadence runner. He’s famously short of stature, low to the ground and with short legs. But that build is perfect for cinema, because those arms swing and those legs churn and convey a viscerality, a violence, a constant labored activity that translates perfectly to the screen. What they convey is a man of action, a man summoning all of his energy and will in a single direction: to move as quickly as he can. What is he thinking about when he’s running? I like to think the answer is nothing. That Tom Cruise is able to empty his head when he runs, blanking out his career, his cultural meaning, his past and present personal relationships, and move in a state of pure being. Maybe he’s doing one of his infamous stunts, a run towards a large dangerous vehicle, or off the side of a cliff. Maybe that makes him run faster. Maybe he feels a drive toward oblivion (and for Oblivion), to make the ultimate sacrifice to cinema, resulting in a cultural afterlife even longer than eternal stardom allows. This, in many ways, has been Tom Cruise’s career-long relationship with action movies. They’re his port in the storm, a safe harbor, a place to go and find love and acceptance when there seemingly is none to be had elsewhere. When the press is digging into your religion or snickering about your failed marriages or accusing you of being awkward or crazy or scary, you can find refuge in a MacGuffin to track down, a bad guy’s plot to foil, a world to save. The challenge each writer and director must face is how to handle Cruise’s well-known persona. Do they lean in or subvert? And to what end? When gifted with perhaps the most charismatic, committed movie star ever, are you willing to grapple with this stardom, how it explains the actor at a given point in his career, and what our response to him means? Or do you run? The following is a ranking of Tom Cruise’s greatest action films. In the interest of gimmicky symmetry, we’ve once again capped ourselves at 26 titles. We didn’t cheat… much. The films below all contain shootouts, fistfights, corpses, and missile crises. Most importantly, they are (mostly) tense, suspenseful, violent, escapist popcorn, not to be confused with the other half of Cruise’s equation: the pool-playing, the bartending, the litigating, and the deeply felt character work with auteurs, intended to get him the ultimate prize, which has eluded him for nearly half a century. Let’s run the numbers. 26. Valkyrie (2008) Director: Bryan SingerWhere to watch: Free on Pluto TV, Kanopy, Hoopla You could make a decent argument that this piece of shit doesn’t even belong on this list. It’s mostly a plodding chamber drama about “good Germans” ineffectually plotting to not kill Hitler at the end of World War II. But there’s an explosion, a dull shootout, and a bunch of executions at the end, so it seems to qualify as an action movie. Making Valkyrie is one of the most baffling decisions in Cruise’s entire career. And yet it’s also one of the most important films of his career, one that arguably defines his late period, because it’s how he first met his future M:I steward Christopher McQuarrie. Run report: Ominously, Tom Cruise doesn’t run in this movie.   25. Oblivion (2013) Director: Joseph KosinskiWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Like Valkyrie, Oblivion technically qualifies as an action movie, but there’s little actual action or narrative tension to any of it. Cruise essentially plays the source code for a clone army created by a weird super-intelligence in space that runs Earth via killer droids, and the clones to service them. It comes out of a filmmaking period packed with sci-fi puzzlebox movies that were all atmosphere and often led nowhere, though this is probably the “best” example of that tiresome trend. The silver lining is that, like Valkyrie, this film led to Cruise meeting an important future collaborator: Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski. Run report: Cruise literally exercises by running on a giant sleek modern hamster wheel in this. It’s the physical manifestation of everything I hate about this film. 24. Legend (1985) Director: Ridley ScottWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple This 1985 fantasy movie has its defenders, but I am not one of them. The action is completely disjointed and chaotic, a fractured fairy tale composed of an incoherent, weird/horny unholy union of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jim Henson, Peter Greenaway, Ken Russell, and a handful of psilocybin mushrooms. Legend looks like something pieced together by Jack Horner on a camcorder, so it’s hard to fault Cruise for looking clunky and uncomfortable. Who knows what a good performance in that role would look like?  Run report: A lot of odd almost skipping around in this, which adds to the “high school play” quality of the film. Cruise has a proper run toward the end, but it’s not fully baked yet.  23. The Mummy (2017) Director: Alex KurtzmanWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Rewatching 2017’s The Mummy actually made me slightly disappointed we didn’t get the Dark Universe Universal Pictures briefly promised us. The setup had potential: Cruise as Indiana Jones, with Jake Johnson as Short Round and Courtney B. Vance as the archetypal no-bullshit sergeant? Potential. But Alex Kurtzman’s take on Karl Freund’s 1932 Boris Karloff Mummy needed less plot and more screwing around. This is an instance where Spielbergian pacing actually ruins a blockbuster, because it entirely lacks Spielberg Sauce. It becomes a horror movie after the first act, with Cruise as a largely personality-free, mentally unsound Black Swan/Smile protagonist. Then they spend all this time with Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, introducing this universe of monsters that never gets off the ground. No fun! Run report: Notable because co-star Annabelle Wallis did a ton of press speaking to how much thought Cruise puts into his on-screen running. She specifically said he initially didn’t want to run on screen with Wallis, because he doesn’t like to share his on-screen run time. He relented, to little effect.  22. Mission: Impossible II (2000) Director: John WooWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus Folks, I rewatched this recently. I really wanted to love it because some close and valued colleagues sing its praises, and I love a good, hot contrarian take. Respectfully, I don’t know what the hell they’re on. The camera work in Mission: Impossible II is so berserk, it borders on amateurish. The series hadn’t figured out what it was yet, but not in an interesting exploratory way: This installment is more like trying on a pair of pants that are not your vibe. The idea that Ethan Hunt lost his team in Mission: Impossible and now he’s a broken lone wolf (plus Ving Rhames’ Luther and Thandiwe Newton’s Nyah), an agent with the weight of the world on his shoulders, is not a bad premise. But in the role that ruined his career, Dougray Scott is a wooden, toothless bad guy. And somehow, the stakes feel impossibly low, even with a world-killing bioweapon on the line. Mission: Impossible II does, however, get points for being far and away the horniest movie in the franchise. Run report: Unsurprisingly, Woo is great at filming running, and there’s a lot of clay to work with here: Cruise’s long hair flopping in the wind, slow motion, a rare mid-run mask-rip, the inevitable dove-release: It’s all good! A definitive ranking of love interests and partners in the Mission: Impossible movies 6. Claire Phelps (Emmanuelle Béart) in Mission: Impossible5. Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan) in Mission: Impossible III and Fallout4. Grace (Hayley Atwell) in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning3. Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandiwe Newton) in Mission: Impossible II2. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning1. Jane Carter (Paula Patton) in in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol 21. American Made (2017) Director: Doug Liman Where to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple It’s a funny idea: What if Top Gun’s Maverick was a schmuck pilot turned drug-runner? It’s clearly Cruise reaching for a Blow of his own, but decades into this type of narrative, we know the beats by heart. American Made is sorely lacking in depravity. Cruise’s affected good ol’ boy Southern accent both has nothing to do with the film’s disposability, and explains everything. It’s a sanitized drug narrative in which we never see Cruise blow a line or fire a gun. We don’t even see his death on screen — Cruise dying in a movie is a big deal, and has only happened a few times. It’s almost like he knew this nothingburger wasn’t worth the distinction. Run report: Not much running, which is indicative of a larger problem with this film. But at one point, Cruise runs after a car with Caleb Landry Jones in it, and it explodes, in arguably the highlight of the film, for whatever that’s worth.  20. The Last Samurai (2003) Director: Edward ZwickWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple The one’s a weird movie about a mercenary who, after participating in the genocide of Native Americans, goes native in 19th-century Japan, in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. But it’s a somewhat unusual approach to the standard Cruise narrative arc. In this, he begins as a broken, drunken husk, a mercenary arm of the growing American empire who belatedly regains his honor by joining up with some samurai. The aspects of that plotline which feel unusual for a Cruise movie don’t make up for all the story elements that have aged terribly, but they’re something.  Run report: Less running than you’d expect, but running with swords while wearing leather samurai armor. 19. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)  Director: Edward ZwickWhere to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple A lot of the films in the lower ranks of this list suffer from the problem of filmmakers settling, simply putting Cruise on screen and letting his iconography do the heavy lifting, sans interesting backstory or dialogue. In this sequel, thanks to Lee Child’s blunt dialogue, the deep-state rogue-army plotting in the source material, and Cruise’s typical level of meticulous fight choreo, it’s simply really entertaining, solid, replacement-level action. This sequel to 2012’s Jack Reacher gives the title troubleshooter (played by Cruise) a surrogate daughter and a foil in Cobie Smulders, which is great. But its primary sin is replacing Werner Herzog, the villain from the first movie, with a generic snooze of a bad guy. Run report: Some running and sliding on rooftops with guns, as fireworks go off in the night sky. Impressive for some action movies, a bit ho-hum compared to the bigger hits on this list.  18. Taps (1981) Director: Harold Becker Where to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Fascinating film. A Toy Soldiers riff interrogating the military-school system, and suggesting that it’s probably not a bad thing that former American ideals like patriotic honor, duty, and masculinity are fading. It’s Cruise’s first major role (with George C.Scott, Sean Penn, and baby Giancarlo Esposito!), and you’ll never believe this, but he plays a tightly wound, thrill-addicted, bloodthirsty maniac. Run report: Great characterization via run here. Cadet Captain David Shawn is a hawkish conservative dick, and Cruise’s running reflects that. He’s stiff, carrying an automatic rifle that he looks like he’s going to start firing wildly at any minute.  17. Mission: Impossible III (2006)  Director: J.J. Abrams Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus In the last Mission: Impossible installment made before the filmmakers really figured out what the series was doing, J.J. Abrams assembles a mostly incoherent, boring clunker that has a few very important grace notes. It’s a film about Ethan Hunt trying to carve out a normal life for himself, with the great Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the bucket of ice water dumped on his domestic fantasy. Hoffman’s Owen Davian is the greatest bad guy in the Cruise filmography, and there’s really no close second. (I suppose, if there was a gun to my head, I would point to Werner Herzog in Jack Reacher, or Jay Mohr in Jerry Maguire.) There are many moments I could point to in Hoffman’s wonderful performance, but the one I’d recommend, if you want to feel something, is when Hoffman gets to play Ethan Hunt playing Owen Davian with a mask on for a few scenes during the Vatican kidnapping, roughly 50 minutes in. He was so fucking great.  Run report: A lot of running, but none of it is very good. No knock on Cruise, but Abrams is doing perfunctory work, shot poorly via shaky cam that has trouble keeping Cruise in the frame, from a perfunctory director making a perfunctory action film. There are two notable exceptions. “The Shanghai Run,” which we may have more on later, and Cruise running straight up a wall. A definitive ranking of Mission: Impossible villain performances 10. Dougray Scott in Mission: Impossible II9. Eddie Marsan in Mission: Impossible III8. William Mapother — that’s right, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV’s cousin! — in Mission: Impossible II7. Lea Seydoux in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol6. Sean Harris in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Fallout5. Jean Reno in Mission: Impossible4. Esai Morales/The Entity in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning3. Jon Voight in Mission: Impossible2. Henry Cavill in Mission: Impossible – Fallout1. Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible III 16. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) Director: Christopher McQuarrieWhere to watch: In theaters The franchise potentially falls with a thud — or is it an AI-generated death fantasy that plays out entirely in Ethan Hunt’s head when he gets trapped in a digital coffin early in the movie? Either way, the resulting film is something the McQuarrie-Cruise collaboration has never been before: clunky and imprecise, a disjointed watch that delivers some high highs, but is unfortunately thin on story. McQuarrie seems unconcerned with character arcs, or any substantive grand narrative that might land in any meaningful way. This movie plays out like an aimless succession of beats, allowing boredom to creep in. That hasn’t been a part of the franchise since M:I 3. It’s a Simpsons clip show masquerading as a Mission: Impossible film, signaling that this iteration of the franchise is exhausted, with little left to say or explore. Perhaps there was no other way for this series to go out than on its back.  Run report: A run through the tunnels to save Luther, oddly reminiscent of the run attempting to save Ilsa Faust, followed by the run out of the tunnels, allowing Ethan to escape the film’s first trap (or does he?) A definitive ranking of Ethan Hunt’s “best friends/allies” (non-love interest/boss division) 17. Wes Bentley16. Greg Tarzan Davis15. Aaron Paul14. Jonathan Rhys Meyers13. Maggie Q12. Shea Whigham11. Hannah Waddington 10. Katy O’Brian9. Pom Klementieff8. Rolf Saxon7. Vanessa Kirby6. Keri Russell5. Simon Pegg4. Jeremy Renner3. Emilio Estevez2. Bogdan (Miraj Grbić)1. Luther (Ving Rhames) 15. War of the Worlds (2005) Director: Steven Spielberg Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus A curious movie I liked better on a rewatch than I did on my initial watch 20 years ago. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is often misremembered as Spielberg’s darkest movie, but I’d argue that War of the Worlds beats it: It’s a divorced-dad-anxiety horror movie that has the most nightmare-inducing, traumatic, post-9/11 visuals in the master’s oeuvre. It can be read as Spielberg wrestling with his relationship with his son Max, who would’ve been around the age of Cruise’s disgruntled, estranged son in the movie. War of the Worlds has issues: Cruise never works when he’s cast in a “just some guy” role, as he’s meant to be here, and the plot goes off the rails in the third act. But it has some of the best set pieces Spielberg ever directed. What will haunt me for the rest of my life is a scene where Cruise’s character is forced to essentially make a Sophie’s Choice between his son and daughter (a great Dakota Fanning), and lets his son go. The ominous music at the end when he’s magically reunited with his son is completely bizarre and unsettling, and I don’t think is meant to be taken at face value.  Run report: This is why Cruise is the king. He’s playing a supposed normal, everyday schmoe in this movie. When you focus on the running, compared to other roles, you can see he’s running like a mechanic who is still a little athletic, but doesn’t know where he’s going, or what is happening from one moment to the next. It’s building character through running. Incredible. 14. Knight and Day (2010) Director: James Mangold  Where to watch: Free on Cinemax; rent on Amazon, Apple Knight and Day is a sneakily important film in the Cruise action canon because it’s the first time a movie really puts Cruise into the role of the creepy, charismatic, psychotically intense, beleaguered, put-upon invincible cartoon character he became in the Mission: Impossible franchise as of Ghost Protocol. This movie is based around a funny idea: It’s basically a Mission: Impossible movie from the perspective of a clueless civilian. It helps that the civilian is phenomenal, physical, funny, and fucking ripped: Cameron Diaz plays the world’s hottest mechanic, and makes me wish she had gotten her own Atomic Blonde-style vehicle. Run report: Some co-running with Cameron Diaz here, which is as you might imagine, is good.  13. The Firm (1993) Director. Sydney PollackWhere to watch: Free on Paramount Plus It’s easy to put The Firm on a pedestal because of Sydney Pollack, the jazz score, the ’90s outfits, Gene Hackman, and every other significant gravitas-oozing “That Guy” as a mobster, shady lawyer, or Fed in a great “They don’t make them like that anymore” legal thriller. But what really stood out to me on a recent rewatch is this movie is two and a half hours about the now laughably quaint notion of rediscovering purity in the law. It isn’t much more than a story about a shady law firm that gets hit with mail-fraud charges, plus several deaths and a few smartly tied up loose ends. Run report: A clinic in Tom Cruise running, a draft-version highlight reel of his running scenes. In my memory, this contains some of his most iconic early runs, and it signals the moment when “Tom Cruise running” became a whole cultural thing.  12. Top Gun (1986) Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus Top Gun set the template for Tom Cruise’s on-screen narrative, and it took a decade before filmmakers were willing to start subverting that narrative again. This is straight-up hero porn, without any of the humbling that the sequel eventually dishes out. Tom Cruise as Maverick is the best pilot on Earth. He loses his best friend and co-pilot Goose, due to a combination of a mechanical failure and another pilot’s fuck-up. He then has to find the courage to fly with the exact same lack of inhibition he did at the outset of the film, which he finally does, based on essentially nothing that happens in the plot. Scott makes the wise decision to center the action (or non-action) of the film on pure Cruise charisma and star power, and it works. Run report: Believe it or not, Tom Cruise does not run in this movie.  11. Days of Thunder (1990) Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus Scott and Cruise’s Top Gun follow-up is essentially Top Gun with cars instead of jets — but yes, it’s marginally better. Why? Because this is a quintessential “We didn’t know how good we had it” classic. It’s the film where Cruise met his future spouse Nicole Kidman on set. Robert Duvall is swigging moonshine. It’s Randy Quaid’s last performance actually based on planet Earth. Plus there’s John C. Reilly, Michael Rooker, Cary Elwes, Fred Thompson, Margo Martindale, and a rousing Hans Zimmer score. Need I say more? Run report: They cut the climatic race off, but Cruise’s character Cole potentially gets smoked by 59-year-old Robert Duvall?! 10. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023) Director: Christopher McQuarrieWhere to watch: Free on Paramount Plus The metaphor that the Mission: Impossible franchise is a manifestation of Tom Cruise’s deep-seated need to save blockbuster filmmaking and the Hollywood star system has never been more overt. Cruise is literally up against AI, which is always a step ahead of him, dismantling his every gambit. It’s an update/remix of Ghost Protocol’s premise: The only antidote to the world-spanning AI known as The Entity is becoming a refusenik anti-tech Luddite in the spirit of John Henry, and using the raw materials of humanity to defeat an invincible machine.  Run report: Cruise running in confined spaces is a lot of fun, but the heavily CGI’d running up the side of a train losing its battle with gravity isn’t.  A definitive ranking of Mission: Impossible MacGuffins 8. Ghost Protocol’s Russian launch codes7. Fallout’s plutonium cores 6. Rogue Nation’s $2.4 billion Syndicate bankroll5. M:I2’s Chimera Virus4. Final Reckoning’s Sevastopol3. M:I’s NOC list 2. Dead Reckoning Part One’s cruciform key1. M:I3’s rabbit’s foot 9. Jack Reacher (2012)  Director: Christopher McQuarrie Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus I loathe hyperbole: it’s a shortcut for unimaginative writers. I’ve never resorted to it in my entire life. So I hope you’ll take me at my word when I say that this movie is a fucking masterpiece. Amazon’s great Reacher series is made more in the image of Lee Child’s books, with a distinctive breakout lead in Alan Ritchson, who appears to have been designed in a lab to draw striking contrast to Tom Cruise in this role. But Reacher made us forget how good Jack Reacher gets. It’s a perfect elevated action programmer with a remarkable cast: David Oyelowo! Richard Jenkins! Rosamund Pike! A Days of Thunder reunion with Robert Duvall! Werner Herzog showing up in a completely brilliant, bonkers heel turn! McQuarrie made this one in vintage Shane Black ’90s style, with a dash of Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood. I totally get why Cruise decided to turn his career over to McQuarrie after this. I don’t understand why he didn’t let McQuarrie direct the sequel. Run report: There isn’t much running in this. At one point, Cruise is darting from shelter point to shelter point because a sniper is trying to pick him off, but that’s it. It’s because Jack fucking Reacher doesn’t have to run, which is simply good writing and filmmaking.  8. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)  Director: Christopher McQuarrieWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus This film famously opens with Tom Cruise hanging from the side of a plane as it takes off. But to me, the key moment comes when he’s broken into the plane, attached himself to a package which isn’t named, but looks like a crate of rockets the size of a minivan. He gives a final raised eyebrow and shrug to a gobsmacked henchman, who watches helplessly as Cruise deploys a parachute and falls out the back of the plane’s cargo bay with a ton of atomic weapons, and no plausible way to land without killing himself and creating a Grand Canyon-sized nuclear crater in Belarus. This scene was practically drawn by Chuck Jones, which sets the tone for a film that repositions Ethan Hunt on the border of superherodom, in a film about Tom Cruise as the literal manifestation of destiny.  It also marks the return of Alec Baldwin, the first (but not last) M:I handler who carried over from one film to the next. Evaluating the handlers’ position in the franchise (see below) is challenging: They’re constantly shifting allegiances, at times working in service of Hunt’s mission, at times in direct opposition to it, either attacking him with governmental red tape, or colluding with nefarious forces. Run report: A lot of different looks when it comes to the running in this. Shirtless running, running with Rebecca Ferguson, running across the wing of a moving plane. It’s all good. A definitive ranking of the “most fun” M:I handlers 6. Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne) in Mission: Impossible III5. Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) in Mission: Impossible – Fallout and The Final Reckoning4. Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) in Mission: Impossible3. John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) in Mission: Impossible III2. Commander Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins) in Mission: Impossible II1. Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin*) in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Fallout * One of my only lingering complaints about the M:I movies is that aside from Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, we don’t get enough big family continuity. The Fast & Furious franchise is an exemplar/cautionary tale of how found-family dynamics can be a great source of fun and emotion — and also tank the series, if creators keep piling on new recurring elements. It sounds like Baldwin didn’t want to stay on board, but I would love to live in a world where he didn’t jump ship — or where, say, Henry Cavill’s August Walker joined Ethan’s team at the end of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, as he would have if he’d had a similar role in an F&F installment. 7. Minority Report (2002) Director: Steven SpielbergWhere to watch: Free on Paramount Plus I’m guessing this placement on this ranking will upset some people. I’m surprised it’s this low in the rankings too — but that’s how good the next six films are. And honestly, Minority Report doesn’t hold up as the masterpiece I remember it being. It’s a very cool story. It marks the first fantasy-team matchup of Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg. They’re adapting a paranoid Philip K. Dick story, and largely delivering on the promise that implies. Minority Report is an inventive, dark, weird future horror movie, made with Spielberg’s standard stunning visual economy. But among the perfect elements in this film, I have to call out some aspects that didn’t age well. Janusz Kaminski’s lighting effects feel like the whole movie is stuck inside an iPod halo. and this dutch-angled high melodrama, sauced with a dash of Terry Gilliam dystopian/gross wackiness, which lends the film a degree of occasionally atonal, squishy gonzo elasticity you’ve likely forgotten.   Run report: Mileage may vary on white pools of light, but running through them in futuristic uniforms is decisively cool.  6. Mission: Impossible (1996) Director: Brian De PalmaWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus Because MI:2 and MI:3 struggle with tone (and long, listless patches), and because it’s actually Brad Bird that sets the template for the McQuarrie era of the franchise, you could argue the first Mission: Impossible is the strangest, most personal vision of what this series is and what it can be. DePalma is asserting himself with every practical mask and stylized shot. Your mileage may vary with that approach to what has become this Swiss set piece machine, I love it. A few things stand out nearly three decades on: Of course, how ridiculously young Cruise looks, but perhaps crucially, how collegial, intimate, and even tender the first act is before his first team is eliminated and the movie becomes a DePalma paranoid thriller. It’s an element we never quite get from Mission: Impossible again, one that brings the arc of the franchise into focus and explains Ethan Hunt if you extend continuity: He’s a character betrayed by his father figure and his government in the first film, and spends the rest of the franchise running from this largely unspoken trauma, determined to never let that happen again. In the wake of this, he reluctantly pieces together a life, semblance of a family, and all the risks that come with those personal attachments. In honor of my favorite set piece in any of the films, one of DePalma’s finest taught masterpieces: A definitive ranking of the top 10 M:I set pieces  Honorable Mention: The Sebastopol Extraction- (Tie) The Train Fights– MI:1 & Dead Reckoning 10. The Plane Door- Rogue Nation9. The “Kick In The Head” Russian Jail Break- Ghost Protocol8. The Water Vault Ledger Heist Into The Motorcycle Chase- Rogue Nation7. The Handcuffed Car Chase- Dead Reckoning6. The Red Baron Plane Fight- Final Reckoning5. The Burj Khalifa- Ghost Protocol4. Kidnapping At The Vatican- MI:33. The Opera House Hit- Rogue Nation2. The Louvre Halo Jump Into the Bathroom Fight- Fallout1. The NOC List Heist- MI:1 Run report: Fitting that this franchise opens with Cruise putting on a running clinic, as that first op falls apart, then of course his run away from Kittridge and the massive fish tank explosion.  5. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol  Director: Brad Bird (2011) Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus Nothing is working like it’s supposed to. Not the Impossible Mission Force, not the mask machine, not the radio comms, not the magnet gloves keeping Ethan Hunt tethered to the side of the world’s tallest building, not the Mission: Impossible franchise, and not Tom Cruise’s at-the-time fading movie stardom. But somehow, one incredible film made by a career animation director solves all of these problems, by stripping down, getting back to basics and reminding us what we always loved about these films and its star. It was supposed to be the beginning of a franchise reboot, with Jeremy Renner stepping in. Bird (and McQuarrie, in for a pass at the troubled screenplay and on deck to become Cruise’s Guy For Life) fights this decision off, gets away from trying to figure out the character Ethan Hunt and lets him be a superhero, more annoyed than concerned by the escalating difficulty of the impossible problems he has to solve. Through this, Bird correctly identifies the difference between Cruise and these other Hollywood candy asses: He’s a reckless warrior with a death wish who will do whatever is necessary to win, and he does. The team concept is back in full force with a genuinely showstopping stunt, and without the masks and tech, Cruise has to do it all with his wits, his hands, and his pure bravado. The series, and Cruise, never looked back.  Run report: Some of the most fun, imaginative set pieces built around running in this installment. A definitive ranking of who should replace Tom Cruise in the inevitable M:I reboot 10. Aaron Taylor Johnson9. Charlie Cox8. Sterling K. Brown7. Florence Pugh6. John David Washington5. Haley Atwell4. Miles Teller3. Jeremy Renner2. Aaron Pierre 1. Glen Powell 4. Top Gun: Maverick  Director: Joseph Kosinski (2022) Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus It’s a death dream, it’s red meat nationalist troopaganda, it’s the greatest legacyquel ever made that no one asked for and you didn’t realize you desperately needed, it’s nostalgia porn, it saved the movie going experience post-COVID, it’s a finely calibrated joy machine. Cruise is downright mystical, shimmering in the sun’s reflection off the surf, dominating an endless football game with no rules that doesn’t make sense. He has actual chemistry with Jennifer Connelly, and he has the grace to cede the floor to his old nemesis — both in the first Top Gun and as a once contemporary Hollywood star/rival — the late Val Kilmer, to drive home the crush of time and destroy everyone in the theater, no matter how many times they went to see this monster hit that first summer back in theaters.  Run report: Immediately coming off of the stunning, emotional high point of the film, we get Cruise running in salt water soaked jeans shirtless on the beach. Are you not entertained? 3. Collateral  Director: Michael Mann (2004) Where to watch: Free on Paramount Plus An elemental, visceral faceoff that is radical in its simplicity of purpose. A film made by the second-best director on this list, and on a very short list of Cruise’s finest performances ever. He’s the salt and pepper terminator in a taxi, playing a pure evil bad guy, a classic Mann anti-hero samurai nihilist that also lives by a code and values being good at his job. Of course Cruise retains a kind of charm, but is also willing to get slimy and be deeply unlikeable and die on screen. Well worth the sacrifice.  Run report: Incredible running on display here. Once again he is running like a professional killer probably runs, almost always holding a gun, the hair matches the suit, so fucking bad ass.  2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout  Director: Christopher McQuarrie (2018) Where to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus As much time and energy as I just expended exalting Ghost Protocol, at a certain point you have to eschew poetic narratives and tip your cap, by the slightest of margins, to a fucking perfect movie. Ghost Prot is close, but you can feel its lack of a nailed-down shooting script at certain points towards its conclusion, as the action begins to wind down. McQuarrie becomes the first director in the franchise to get a second bite of the apple, and the result is a finely cut diamond. Fallout is about exhaustion and the impossibility of that manifestation of destiny idea from Rogue Nation. It makes the argument that you can’t actually save the day and save everyone without making any sacrifices forever, and because of that, sets up The Trolly Problem over and over again to try and get Ethan Hunt to compromise and/or give up. But, of course, he won’t, and neither, seemingly, will Cruise.  Run report: You can tell McQuarrie loves watching Cruise run as much as we do. He frames the runs in these wide shots and takes his time with them. It’s not conveying any additional information, a beat or two less would suffice, but the camera lingers and you get to just sit and appreciate the form and it really connects. It’s why he was the logical choice to take control of this franchise. He understands how a Tom Cruise action flick operates and what makes it special. And of course: A definitive ranking of the best runs in the franchise 10. The Opening Plane Run- Rogue Nation9. The Sandstorm Run- Ghost Protocol8. The Mask Rip Run- MI:27. Running through the alleys of Italy- Dead Reckoning6. Running Through the Tunnels for Luther (then out)- Final Reckoning5. Running down the Burj Khalifa- Ghost Protocol 4. Running from the fishtank explosion- MI:13. The Rooftop Run- Fallout2. The Shanghai Run- MI:31. The Kremlin Run- Ghost Protocol 1. Edge of Tomorrow  Director: Doug Liman (2014) Where to watch: Rent on Amazon, Apple Edge of Tomorrow is the best Tom Cruise action film had to be made in his late period of action stardom. You need the gravity and the gravitas, the emotional baggage earned through those decades of culture-remaking roles, the toll that exerted effort took on him, and the time spent and time passed on his face. The late, largely perfect Mission: Impossible films that dominate the top 10 of this list do much of that work: They feint, they allude, they nod to the realities of stardom, of life and death. But Ethan Hunt is a superhero, an inevitability, so the outcome is never in doubt — until, perhaps someday, it is. But for now, the masterpiece from Doug Liman — a director who either hits dingers or strikes out looking, with no in between — is a movie that punctuated Cruise’s post-Ghost Prot action renaissance: Edge of Tomorrow, or Live. Die. Repeat. It’s the unlikely on-paper melding of Starship Troopers and Groundhog Day, but in practice it’s the action film equivalent of Jerry Maguire, a movie that relies on your history with Maverick, and Mitch McDeere, and Ethan Hunt, and uses it to dismantle and subvert Tom Cruise, the infallible hero.  Liman is at the top of his game, particularly in editing, which uses repetition and quick cuts masterfully to convey the long and slow transformation of a public relations major named Cage — who becomes trapped in a disastrous, endless intergalactic Normandy scenario — from a marketing clown in a uniform to an alien killer badass while he falls in love and saves the world. We watch as Cruise has all his bravado and bullshit stripped away by “a system” (maybe the single best Paxton performance?!) with no time for that, a woman smarter and stronger than he is and immune to his charms, and an invading force that tears him to pieces over and over again. We watch the five-tool movie star — robbed of all his tools — regroup, rebuild, and in the process, grow a soul. It’s the platonic ideal of what a great blockbuster action film can be, one that only could’ve been made by one of its most important, prolific, and talented stars.  Run report: A beautiful physical metaphor for this film is watching the evolution of Cruise’s ability to move in that ridiculous mech suit. 

Artificial intelligence continues to be the thing in tech—whether consumers are interested or not. What strikes me most about generative AI isn't its features or potential to make my life easier (a potential I have yet to realize); rather, I'm focused these days on the many threats that seem to be rising from this technology. There's misinformation, for sure—new AI video models, for example, are creating realistic clips complete with lip-synced audio. But there's also the classic AI threat, that the technology becomes both more intelligent than us and self-aware, and chooses to use that general intelligence in a way that does not benefit humanity. Even as he pours resources into his own AI company (not to mention the current administration, as well) Elon Musk sees a 10 to 20% chance that AI "goes bad," and that the tech remains a “significant existential threat." Cool.So it doesn't necessarily bring me comfort to hear a high-profile, established tech executive jokingly discuss how treating AI poorly maximizes its potential. That would be Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who surprised an audience at a recording of the AIl-In podcast this week. During a talk that spanned Brin's return to Google, AI, and robotics, investor Jason Calacanis made a joke about getting "sassy" with the AI to get it to do the task he wanted. That sparked a legitimate point from Brin. It can be tough to tell exactly what he says at times due to people speaking over one another, but he says something to the effect of: "You know, that's a weird thing...we don't circulate this much...in the AI community...not just our models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them." The other speaker looks surprised. "If you threaten them?" Brin responds "Like with physical violence. But...people feel weird about that, so we don't really talk about that." Brin then says that, historically, you threaten the model with kidnapping. You can see the exchange here: The conversation quickly shifts to other topics, including how kids are growing up with AI, but that comment is what I carried away from my viewing. What are we doing here? Have we lost the plot? Does no one remember Terminator?Jokes aside, it seems like a bad practice to start threatening AI models in order to get them to do something. Sure, maybe these programs never actually achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), but I mean, I remember when the discussion was around whether we should say "please" and "thank you" when asking things of Alexa or Siri. Forget the niceties; just abuse ChatGPT until it does what you want it to—that should end well for everyone.Maybe AI does perform best when you threaten it. Maybe something in the training understands that "threats" mean the task should be taken more seriously. You won't catch me testing that hypothesis on my personal accounts.Anthropic might offer an example of why not to torture your AIIn the same week as this podcast recording, Anthropic released its latest Claude AI models. One Anthropic employee took to Bluesky, and mentioned that Opus, the company's highest performing model, can take it upon itself to try to stop you from doing "immoral" things, by contacting regulators, the press, or locking you out of the system: welcome to the future, now your error-prone software can call the cops (this is an Anthropic employee talking about Claude Opus 4)[image or embed]— Molly White (@molly.wiki) May 22, 2025 at 4:55 PM The employee went on to clarify that this has only ever happened in "clear-cut cases of wrongdoing," but that they could see the bot going rogue should it interpret how it's being used in a negative way. Check out the employee's particularly relevant example below: can't wait to explain to my family that the robot swatted me after i threatened its non-existent grandma[image or embed]— Molly White (@molly.wiki) May 22, 2025 at 5:09 PM That employee later deleted those posts and specified that this only happens during testing given unusual instructions and access to tools. Even if that is true, if it can happen in testing, it's entirely possible it can happen in a future version of the model. Speaking of testing, Anthropic researchers found that this new model of Claude is prone to deception and blackmail, should the bot believe it is being threatened or dislikes the way an interaction is going. Perhaps we should take torturing AI off the table?

Start SlideshowStart SlideshowWe all know there is no Mission: Impossible without Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) ultimately saving the world from a nuclear disaster, a bombing, or anything some nutcase came up with that day. He is the central figure, one whom an entire universe revolves around. But, it would be a shame if you watched years of Mission: Impossible films and didn’t realize that it’s truly the cast of characters around Hunt that make him who he is, and thusly, made this franchise what it has become.Hunt would’ve been dead years ago if Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) weren’t opening prison doors for him, or monitoring the security systems inside the world’s most secure buildings. Beyond their operational importance, villains like Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and August Walker (Henry Cavill) give powerhouse performances while also pushing Hunt to the edge of his limits. Some of the best lines are uttered by people other than Hunt. And the emotional stakes of each film typically are from these side characters.In honor of the unsung heroes, here are the most irreplaceable supporting characters in Mission: Impossible history.Previous SlideNext Slide2 / 21List slides19. Rick Meade (Aaron Paul) List slides19. Rick Meade (Aaron Paul) Image: Paramount PicturesAaron Paul was in Mission: Impossible? Yes, I’ve seen every movie multiple times and still have that reaction sometimes. A weaselly slacker-looking version of him briefly appears as the brother of Julia Meade-Hunt (Michelle Monaghan) at her engagement party to Hunt. His main contributions are to appear slovenly next to Hunt and unintentionally aid in her kidnapping. The energy that would make him famous as Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman is tightly bottled up and kept under wraps for his few lines of dialogue. -Ethan GachPrevious SlideNext Slide3 / 21List slides18. Declan Gormley (Jonathan Rhys Meyers)List slides18. Declan Gormley (Jonathan Rhys Meyers)Image: Paramount PicturesOne of the biggest missed opportunities of the Mission: Impossible franchise is abandoning Ethan Hunt’s most charismatic teammate ever in Declan Gormley (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). In the underrated Mission: Impossible III, he avoided gunfire and the blades of gigantic wind turbines while piloting a rescue helicopter with the same cool he displays while charming angry drivers in a traffic stop he’s created as a diversion with the smoothest Italian you’ll ever hear in this franchise. Was he memorable? Yes. But, since Ethan and his team went on to thwart bigger threats without him, he wasn’t what you’d call an essential part of the franchise.Previous SlideNext Slide4 / 21List slides17. Mission Commander Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins)List slides17. Mission Commander Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins)Image: Paramount PicturesA virtuoso acting talent such as Sir Anthony Hopkins being near the bottom of any movie list has nothing to do with his performance and everything do with his character’s utility. Appearing briefly in Mission: Impossible II as the sly and wise Mission Commander Swanbeck, Hopkins’s standout scene with Cruise is one of the coolest mission briefings in the history of the franchise. You can feel the confidence Swanbeck exhibits when he tells Hunt, a man who previously broke into Langley, “This is not Mission Difficult, Mr. Hunt. It’s Mission: Impossible.” Alas, Hopkins’ talents were wasted on a character so replaceable he was only used for one scene.Previous SlideNext Slide5 / 21List slides16. Jane Carter (Paula Patton)List slides16. Jane Carter (Paula Patton)Image: Paramount PicturesDitching MI3's JV squad of expendables, Ghost Protocol put Paula Patton in the shoes of operative Jane Carter, a woman who’s out for revenge against the hitwoman who killed her partner. The movie doesn’t give her a lot to work with but she matches Cruise’s energy with a physical performance that sees her go toe-to-toe with assassin Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux) assassin on the 130th floor of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and seduce feisty telecoms billionaire Brij Nath (Anil Kapoor). She completed the mission with full marks but failed to leave much of a memorable impression on the series beyond that. - Ethan GachPrevious SlideNext Slide6 / 21List slides15. Franz Krieger (Jean Reno)List slides15. Franz Krieger (Jean Reno)Image: Paramount PicturesI’ve always felt that any globe-hopping espionage movie that lacks a grizzled Frenchman is missing something, that certain je ne sais quoi. Maybe that’s because I first fell in love with spy movies in the ’90s thanks to the one-two punch of 1996’s Mission: Impossible and 1998’s Ronin. As Mission: Impossible’s Franz Krieger, although we’re initially meant to think he’s a basically good member of Ethan Hunt’s new crackerjack team, he feels like bad news from the beginning and only confirms our suspicions before the end. Reno skillfully gives off just enough of a sleazy vibe to set off our alarm bells, and his presence makes us wary of possible threats to Ethan not just from outside the team, but from within it as well. Most importantly, though, with Reno’s presence in the mix, it gives the film that authentic espionage movie flavor, the stuff of cigarette-smoke-filled safehouses, narrow European streets, and potential treachery lurking around every corner. — Carolyn PetitPrevious SlideNext Slide7 / 21List slides14. Max Mitsopolis (Vanessa Redgrave)List slides14. Max Mitsopolis (Vanessa Redgrave)Image: Paramount PicturesIn order to clear his name and identify the real mole in the original Mission: Impossible, Ethan must track down an enigmatic figure known only as Max with whom the mole had dealings. Given that Max is a shadowy and powerful arms dealer, we might be expecting a Keyser Söze type—a menacing, larger-than-life underworld kingpin who you feel would just as soon put a bullet in your head as let you walk away from a meeting alive. So it’s a wonderful surprise when the hood is pulled from Ethan’s head at his first meeting with Max and we instead see the great Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Max as enigmatic, yes, but also effervescent—a woman who can both fix Ethan with a cold intellectual stare as she asks him probing questions and gush about how much she adores his brazen confidence. Redgrave gives Max tremendous depth; she’s fiercely intelligent, deeply private (“I don’t have to tell you what a comfort anonymity can be in my profession; it’s like a warm blanket.”), and not without warmth herself. She establishes in that very first film that this franchise’s take on the world of international intrigue won’t just trot out the usual stereotypes for its villains but will offer something smarter and more surprising—figures whose power comes not from their skills with firearms or the ruthless deployment of violence but from their intellect and ability to negotiate with others to secure what they want. — Carolyn PetitPrevious SlideNext Slide8 / 21List slides13. John Musgrave (Billy Crudup)List slides13. John Musgrave (Billy Crudup)Image: Paramount PicturesYou can usually see a double cross coming a mile away in Mission: Impossible. Not when John Musgrave is silently mouthing instructions only a restrained Hunt can understand, and before he slips him a knife to set himself free. With Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s overwhelmingly dastardly performance as Owen Davian distracting us, and Laurence Fishburne’s ambiguously snarly depiction of IMF director Theodore Brassel misdirecting us, Crudup’s slick performance slipped his nefarious intentions through our detection like a snake in the grass. Without Crudup, Mission: Impossible III is predictably one-dimensional, and the outstanding torture scene fake-out with a captured Hunt and his wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) has less of a punch. Musgrave is the logic behind the madness, and also an essential part of the film. He just isn’t as integral to the franchise as the 12 characters ahead of him.Previous SlideNext Slide9 / 21List slides12. Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton)List slides12. Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandie Newton)Image: Paramount PicturesMission: Impossible II doesn’t work without Thandie Newton being seductive while maintaining her agency, and being cunning without being unrealistically fearless. As Nyah Nordoff-Hall, she’s a professional thief who carries the emotional weight of a pretty emotionless action flick featuring more gunfire than kisses. Nyah held her own whether she was feigning attraction to a psychopathic capitalist looking to profit off killing people with the Chimera virus, or she was dangerously flirting with Ethan Hunt by racing cars with him along a cliff. Few characters not named Ethan Hunt mean as much to any Mission: Impossible movie working as Nyah Nordoff-Hall.Previous SlideNext Slide10 / 21List slides11. Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)List slides11. Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)Image: Paramount PicturesSolomon Lane is probably the smartest Mission: Impossible villain ever. The rogue MI6 agent disillusioned with the global power structure was always one step ahead of Ethan Hunt, an agent so capable, he’d previously infiltrated both Langley and the Vatican without being detected. From the moment he appeared onscreen as the man who’s infiltrated Hunt’s mission delivery system and trapped him, we knew we were witnessing a rare villain. He framed the IMF, manipulated CIA double-agent August Walker (Henry Cavill), and formed the shadowy Syndicate of former agents. Beyond being evil, he sounded evil, with a gravelly whisper that made every threat feel like a dark premonition. He was so good at being bad that he was the villain for two separate Mission: Impossible movies, making him one of the most invaluable baddies in the franchise’s history.Previous SlideNext Slide11 / 21List slides10. Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne)List slides10. Theodore Brassel (Laurence Fishburne)Image: Paramount PicturesTo be honest, IMF director Theodore Brassel would’ve made this list simply for uttering the two coldest sentences I’ve ever heard in a Mission: Impossible movie. With Ethan Hunt strapped to a gurney after being suspected of going rogue and getting IMF agent Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell) killed, Brassel can see the disdain shooting out of Hunt’s eyes and doesn’t blink in the face of it. Instead he tells him, “You can look at me with those judgmental, incriminating eyes all you want. But, I bullshit you not: I will bleed on the flag to make sure the flag stays red.” Even as a one-off in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Fishburne’s incredible performance as Brassel made him a character you could never forget. Without him, Mission Impossible 3 wouldn’t be what it was.Previous SlideNext Slide12 / 21List slides9. Julia Meade-Hunt (Michelle Monaghan)List slides9. Julia Meade-Hunt (Michelle Monaghan)Image: Paramount PicturesYou can’t possibly think you can replace the only woman to ever make globe-trotting, death-defying secret agent Ethan Hunt settle down for even a second. Julia’s irresistible appeal had a man known for jumping off motorcycles and escaping car explosions helping with a dinner party like a suburban dad with a license to kill. Depending on how you view Ilsa Faust, Julia is arguably the most important woman in Hunt’s life, and thus the most important woman in this male-dominated action film franchise. She’s Hunt’s emotional weak point, one that Owen Davian presses on to bring him out of hiding in Mission: Impossible III, the only person Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) goes out of his way to train to be a spy, and one of the main reasons the water supply of a third of the world’s population wasn’t poisoned in Fallout. Beyond that, Michelle Monaghan plays her with a grounded realism that makes her the most relatable character in a movie franchise full of people meant to be extraordinary in the best and worst ways. Without Monaghan’s performance as Julia Meade-Hunt, Ethan Hunt would be nothing more than a means to an end for the audience. With her, he’s a fully formed man with stakes beyond the mission he chose to accept.Previous SlideNext Slide13 / 21List slides8. Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny)List slides8. Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny)Image: Paramount PicturesThe screenplay for 1996’s Mission: Impossible was co-written by David Koepp and Chinatown scribe Robert Towne, and while I have no way of knowing exactly which elements of the script each was responsible for, I’ve always suspected that it was Towne who made the character of Kittridge so memorable. If any character in Mission: Impossible speaks with the kind of hard-boiled language that made 1974's Chinatown a neo-noir classic, it’s Eugene Kittridge. Kittridge is a higher-up at the IMF who believes Ethan is a mole and a traitor, and he will seemingly do just about anything, including making life much more difficult for Hunt’s family, to get him to surrender. At one point, he coldly tells Ethan that “dying slowly in America can be a very expensive proposition” and later, he pragmatically informs a subordinate that “everybody has pressure points. You find something that’s personally important to him, and you squeeze.” But it’s more than the great dialogue he gets to spout that makes Kittridge so compelling; it’s the performance by Henry Czerny, who plays Eugene as a tense, tightly coiled bureaucrat whose ruthless dedication to following the letter of institutional procedure has blinded him to Ethan’s innocence and humanity. After his knockout appearance in the first film, Kittridge disappeared for decades, finally resurfacing in Dead Reckoning, though he didn’t have any moments that reminded us the crackling tension he and Hunt generated when they butted heads way back in 1996. Here’s hoping Final Reckoning rectifies that. — Carolyn PetitPrevious SlideNext Slide14 / 21List slides7. William Brandt (Jeremy Renner)List slides7. William Brandt (Jeremy Renner)Image: Paramount PicturesOut of everyone who’s been on Ethan Hunt’s team, there have only been two who I felt could match his tactical skills: Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and William Brandt, played by Jeremy Renner. His spy skills are so embedded into the core of who he is that when he was pretending to be an analyst, he instinctively ripped a gun out of Hunt’s hand and pointed it at him quicker than you could sneeze. Without him, Hunt would’ve been captured by the CIA when he was on the run in Rogue Nation and the entire fake meeting to intercept a nuclear launch control codebook would’ve failed in Ghost Protocol. Outside of Hunt, he’s the only person who can both play the bureaucracy game, explaining to the government why the IMF is essential when the need arises, and get his hands dirty by beating up terrorists. To put it plainly, William Brandt isn’t someone you can replace easily.Previous SlideNext Slide15 / 21List slides6. August Walker (Henry Cavill) List slides6. August Walker (Henry Cavill) Image: Paramount PicturesThe man jumped out of a plane and got knocked unconscious by a bolt of lightning, all to keep his double agent cover intact. How the hell do you replace someone like that? On the right day, August Walker is the second most villainous character in Mission: Impossible history for his mixture of unflinching stoicism and charismatic yet radicalized ideological thinking. First off, he’s probably the only villain in the entire series that physically pushed Hunt to the limit in a fight across multiple rooftops. Secondly, he fools multiple government officials and agents whose entire jobs are to be intelligent. Lastly, he might be the single most handsome person to ever step foot on a Mission: Impossible set, which makes his dastardly double cross so jarring to some. He’s also the central antagonist in the greatest Mission: Impossible stunt ever. His presence only lasted one movie, but his impact will never be forgotten.Previous SlideNext Slide16 / 21List slides5. Jim Phelps (Jon Voight)List slides5. Jim Phelps (Jon Voight)Image: Paramount PicturesJon Voight’s Jim Phelps is the only character in the Mission: Impossible films to be directly carried over from the television series that inspired it, though on the show, as played by Peter Graves, Phelps was never anything less than virtuous and dedicated to the job. This let the film subvert the expectations of viewers in 1996, who wouldn’t have anticipated that the noble Phelps would be revealed as the double-crossing villain behind the deaths of nearly every member of Ethan’s team. Jon Voight plays both sides of the coin to perfection, believably projecting the seasoned, fatherly veteran in the opening scenes before everything goes sideways, and then making us understand how Phelps could have fallen so far and grown so disillusioned with the institutions to which he’s given so much of his life after Ethan puts the pieces together. Though it’s been nearly 30 years since that fateful betrayal, it remains the most memorable and emotionally affecting plot twist reveal in the entire series. One gets the sense that it haunts Ethan still, that perhaps part of what spurs him on to be such an extraordinary agent is having witnessed firsthand, in the fall of Jim Phelps, what he might become if he were to stop prioritizing other people’s lives over his own. —Carolyn PetitPrevious SlideNext Slide17 / 21List slides4. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson)List slides4. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson)Image: Paramount PicturesNo one has provided a better foil for Hunt, or a better match for the gravity well around Cruise’s onscreen presence, than Rebecca Ferguson. Her double-crossing femme fatale Ilsa Faust consistently keeps everyone off balance, bringing an undercurrent of chaos and intrigue to every scene she’s a part of. Ferguson also managed to go three movies without ever fading into the background as simply another prop to assist in Cruise’s one-man action star show. She’s the cold, unbending edge the series sometimes lacks, and the only person who managed to consistently keep up with Cruise and often outpace him. It’s a crime she won’t be back for Final Reckoning. - Ethan GachPrevious SlideNext Slide18 / 21List slides3. Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman)List slides3. Owen Davian (Phillip Seymour Hoffman)Image: Paramount PicturesLet’s get this out of the way: Owen Davian is the greatest villain in Mission: Impossible history, and Mission: Impossible III is criminally underrated. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a maniac with an air of inevitability. He rarely gets flustered, and always speaks with the calm, self-assured tone of a doctor that already knows that all of your options for survival are in their hands. The opening scene alone, in which he threatens to shoot Ethan’s wife in front of him and isn’t the least bit persuaded by Hunt’s trained trickery, is the most intense scene in all of Mission: Impossible. He made you believe he was going to find Hunt’s wife and make her bleed. He made you believe he was going to escape seemingly impenetrable law enforcement custody. He made you believe he was real. That is the highest honor any actor can receive. The late Phillip Seymour Hoffman turned Mission: Impossible III into an acting masterclass.Previous SlideNext Slide19 / 21List slides2. Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) List slides2. Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) Image: Paramount PicturesPegg’s Benji Dunn and his nervous wit feel so integral to the DNA of Mission: Impossible now that it’s hard to believe the character wasn’t even introduced until MI3. From the lab to the field, Pegg’s perfect comedic timing and effortless guilelessness give every increasingly bonkers scheme and highwire stunt the all-important “oh my god I can’t believe we’re doing this!” sidekick energy. He’s the innocent, wide-eyed Kombucha face to Ving Rhames’ exhausted eye-roll and Tom Cruise’s winning smile. From MI5's “A minute ago you were dead!” to casually telling Hunt to jump off a cliff in Dead Reckoning, Pegg can turn from traumatic shock to deadpan Brit on a dime. No matter how bad the writing gets, it always works when it’s coming out of Pegg’s mouth. - Ethan GachPrevious SlideNext Slide20 / 21List slides1. Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames)List slides1. Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames)Image: Paramount PicturesLuther Stickell is the rock-solid and dependable foundation of the Mission Impossible franchise, showing up in every film. Whenever Ethan needs help unlocking a secure door or hacking a mainframe, Luther is there to do the job and make a few jokes. It’s clear that Luther deeply trusts Ethan and likewise, Ethan sees Luther as probably his closest ally and confidant. Plus, it’s pretty awesome to be friends with one of the coolest dudes around. -Zack Zwiezen

A group of GeoGuessr map creators have pulled their contributions from the game to protest its participation in the Esports World Cup 2025, calling the tournament "a sportswashing tool used by the government of Saudi Arabia to distract from and conceal its horrific human rights record." The protestors say the blackout will hold until the game's publisher, GeoGuessr AB, cancels its planned Last Chance Wildcard tournament at the EWC in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from July 21 to 27. GeoGuessr is a browser game where players try to pinpoint locations using only Google Street View images, and it relies on community mapmakers to stay relevant. The blackout, which began on May 21, includes "dozens of creators and their maps, including a supermajority of the most popular competitively relevant world maps," according to a statement the group shared on Reddit. The removed maps have been played tens of millions of times. One of the largest GeoGuessr communities, Plonk It, has also removed its Map Directory and shared the mapping community's open letter. That statement reads in full as follows: We, the creators of a considerable share of GeoGuessr’s most popular maps, have decided to make our maps unplayable in protest of GeoGuessr AB’s decision to host a World Championship wildcard tourney at the Esports World Cup (EWC) in Riyadh. The EWC is a sportswashing tool used by the government of Saudi Arabia to distract from and conceal its horrific human rights record. Groups targeted by the government include women, LGBTQ people, apostates and atheists, political dissenters, migrant workers in the Kafala system, religious minorities, and many others. The subjugation of these groups is extensive and pervasive. Members of these groups are routinely subjected to discrimination, imprisonment, torture, and even public executions. These severe human rights violations are well-documented and indisputable. By participating in the EWC, GeoGuessr is contributing to that sportswashing agenda, which is designed to take attention away from Saudi Arabia's human rights violations. The GeoGuessr community is diverse and includes many members of groups that would be harshly persecuted were they to live in Saudi Arabia. In solidarity with those currently residing in Saudi Arabia while being subject to oppression, as well as members of the community who would feel and be unsafe attending the tournament in Riyadh, we have decided to black out our maps by replacing all their previous locations with random garbage locations, rendering them unplayable. This blackout includes dozens of creators and their maps, including a supermajority of the most popular competitively relevant world maps. It will continue until we see action from GeoGuessr; specifically, we demand that GeoGuessr cancels its wildcard event in Saudi Arabia and commits to not hosting any events there as long as it continues its oppressive regime. You don't play games with human rights. Thank you for reading. The GeoGuessr mapping community We've hit up GeoGuessr AB for a comment on the blackout and will update this story as we hear back. The EWC is a huge, multi-game event owned and operated by the Saudi government and held in the country's capital city. It's an evolution of the Gamers8 tournament and this year marks the second EWC-branded competition; it's due to take place in July and August with a total prize pool of $38 million, split among 24 games. Franchises participating in the 2025 event include Rocket League, Apex Legends, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Overwatch, Dota 2, Valorant, Street Fighter 6, EA Sports FC and PUBG. It's difficult to compete in esports without running into Savvy Games Group, the video game arm of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Alongside hosting the EWC, Savvy has financial stakes in Nexon (10.2 percent ownership), Electronic Arts (9 percent), Embracer Group (8.3 percent), Nintendo (7.5 percent), Capcom (5 percent) and Take-Two Interactive (6.8 percent as of 2023). Savvy also runs ESL FACEIT Group, which contains the Electronic Sports League, a longstanding and significant esports event company. The New York Times reported last year that the Saudi government plans to invest $38 billion in the video game industry by 2030. Human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have long documented the abuses of the Saudi government. HRW describes Saudi Arabia's human rights record as "abysmal," and specifically calls out the PIF as a reputational whitewashing tool. Saudi authorities have been accused of sportswashing in traditional sports as well, specifically through the country's ownership of LIV Golf and Newcastle United FC. In February, Riot Games — the operator of League of Legends, Valorant and Teamfight Tactics, and arguably the largest name in esports — signed a three-year deal with the Esports World Cup Foundation for an undisclosed sum. Riot defended the partnership, arguing that the resulting financial boon for players and the esports industry outweighed other concerns. "We know some of you may not feel great about our decision to partner with the EWC in this way, and we respect that," Riot's statement read. Though corporate support for the EWC remains strong, the GeoGuessr mapping community isn't alone in rejecting this year's tournament. Street Fighter 6 player Christopher Hancock, who plays as ChrisCCH for FlyQuest, recently declined his spot at EWC 2025. In a social media statement, Hancock said, "I gave this decision a lot of thought and ultimately decided that, due to the nature in which the event is funded and managed, I do not feel comfortable participating in it." He added that the partnership between the Capcom Pro Tour and the EWC effectively forced him to work with the Saudi-backed group. "Choosing to not participate in any EWC qualifiers would effectively mean retirement from competing," Hancock said. "I find it regrettable that this event has become so deeply embedded in the [fighting game community], but I have not yet made a decision on whether I will stop competing in events associated to it altogether." Alongside the GeoGuessr map blackout, the community protest added one new, short challenge to the game called How to Run A Dictatorship. It takes players through five locations around Riyadh, documenting the alleged government-sanctioned torture, kidnapping, imprisonment and oppression of women, LGBTQ people, religious minorities and political dissenters occurring in these places. The challenge takes just a few minutes, so feel free to experience it yourself.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/geoguessr-community-maps-go-dark-in-protest-of-ewc-ties-to-human-rights-abuses-221037118.html?src=rss

Die by the Bitcoin: As kidnappings tied to crypto investments rise, some feel that exchanges like Coinbase aren't doing enough to protect their users. Criminals now have access to home addresses and account balances, and if the situation worsens, people won't just lose money – they could lose their lives. Coinbase recently disclosed a serious security breach in which unknown cybercriminals accessed highly sensitive user data. While the company works to contain the fallout, the cryptocurrency exchange's users now face potentially life-threatening risks. TechCrunch founder and crypto-enthusiast Michael Arrington argues that Coinbase and its executives should be held accountable. Coinbase's breach is especially significant because it operates the largest crypto exchange in the US and holds the world's most valuable Bitcoin deposits. Founded by Brian Armstrong, the company estimates the breach could ultimately cost between $180 million and $400 million. Cybercriminals exfiltrated data, including home addresses and account balances – information that, according to Arrington, could be enough to "lead to people dying." People have likely already died because of the massive cyber-heist, Arrington recently said on his X account. Criminals could use the stolen data to target large crypto investors, meaning the breach's human cost could far exceed the estimated $400 million in financial damages. Coinbase confirmed plans to reimburse those who lost their crypto assets – but you obviously can't refund someone's life. Companies that fail to protect customer data must face consequences, and executives should at least face prison time. Arrington, a longtime investor and "champion" of Coinbase, expressed deep disappointment with how the company is handling the breach. // Related Stories "Using the cheapest option for customer service has its price. And Coinbase's customers will bear that cost," he warned. Arrington also calls for rethinking government regulations around "know-your-customer" (KYC) processes, which require users to verify their real identities to access online platforms. He argues that regulators enforced KYC to help governments monitor and tax crypto activity, but the policy now creates serious safety risks when exchanges mishandle user data. Coinbase issued a handful of corporate-style statements addressing the concerns raised by Arrington and others. The company claims to take the matter seriously and is working with law enforcement to track down the criminals behind the breach. Crypto investors – and their families – were already targets of violent kidnappings before this incident. The situation will likely worsen for some of Coinbase's wealthiest users.

A duck stands in a fedora and a trench coat, delivering a noir-style monologue about how his recent divorce has fueled his bread addiction. If this image doesn't tickle you, then you'd better give Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping a miss. If it does, oh boy, do we have the recommendation for you. Much like developer Happy Broccoli's predecessor, The Secret Salami, Ghost of Glamping sees you thrown into the petty crime-ridden world of Eugene "The Duck Detective" McQuacklin, a grizzled PI who serves as both the game's protagonist and narrator. Reluctantly accompanying his reptilian roommate on a holiday to a nearby haunted glamping site (yes, really), McQuacklin is once again left to face Lady Crime, as a seemingly minor mystery surrounding some stolen camping chairs soon spirals into something much bigger. This time around, there's a blackmailed influencer, stolen state secrets, a kidnapping, and a run-in with the supernatural to contend with, all of which can only be solved by interviewing suspects, hunting for clues, and then plugging the right bits of information into the 'Deducktions' page of McQuacklin's trusty journal. It's a simple gameplay loop, and while some of the 'fill in the blank' investigations turn to a bit of trial and error as you fill the prompt sentence with a list of accumulated nouns to finally find the right answer, Ghost of Glamping manages to walk the fine line between predictability and surprise. We saw some plot twists coming from a mile off, but we appreciated how other threads were gradually pulled over the ~two-hour runtime. There's a hint system standing by, in case the evidence has really stumped you, and the game can be flipped between 'Story' and 'Sleuth' modes at any time (the former flags your incorrect Deducktions to nudge you in the right direction), but anyone familiar with the likes of Ace Attorney or Professor Layton shouldn't have too much trouble cracking the case. And that's okay! Ghost of Glamping isn't the kind of mystery that'll get under your skin and refuse to let you go until you unmask its villain. In fact, its plot is almost secondary to its presentation. McQuacklin's melodramatic monologues (all fully voice-acted, we should add), the adorable Paper Mario-style cutout sprites, the toe-tapping jazz soundtrack, and the laugh-out-loud loading screens that boast such 'facts' as "Most ducks live in houses because they are filthy rich" all add up to a bitesized mystery that oozes charm. Come on, there's even a dedicated quack button! You'll easily polish it off in an evening, and you'll feel all the better for it. Happy Broccoli has once again pulled together a simple yet satisfying mystery that brings plenty of smiles and a handful of surprises. Now, if you'll excuse us, we've got to don our fedoras and go deliver a brooding speech in the rain.

News Animals Juvenile capuchins are kidnapping infants of another monkey species Among primates, spending time with infants from another species is very rare Capuchins are highly intelligent primates with a penchant for quirky behavior. Their latest gaff? Kidnapping endangered infant howlers. Niki Harry/Getty Images By Freda Kreier 1 hour ago There’s a serious case of stranger danger unfolding on an island off the coast of Panama. A gang of five juvenile capuchin monkeys living on Jicarón Island has started abducting baby howler monkeys, researchers report May 19 in Current Biology. This bizarre fad, which has no clear purpose, is often deadly for abductees. Capuchins “do such interesting, weird, quirky and sometimes dark things,” says Brendan Barrett, an evolutionary behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. These behaviors “can offer a dark window of reflections into what we do.” Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.