• The Rogue Trooper movie could make or break Unreal Engine as a tool for filmmaking


    Who knew just 4 images could be so controversial?
    The Rogue Trooper movie could make or break Unreal Engine as a tool for filmmaking Who knew just 4 images could be so controversial?
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  • Temuera Morrison Says He's 'Sad' Not to Have Played Boba Fett Since the Divisive Disney+ show The Book of Boba Fett: 'I've Been Preserved for a Later Date'

    What’s happening with Boba Fett? The last time we saw the legendary Star Wars character was at the end of his own show, The Book of Boba Fett, in February 2022. Yes, the Disney+ spin-off series was divisive, with some Star Wars fans feeling it went too far in softening the iconic villain's character. But that can’t be it for Boba Fett, can it?Over three years later, it feels like The Book of Boba Fett Season 2 is stuck in a galaxy far, far away. Lucasfilm has given no indication that the show will return, with next year’s The Mandalorian & Grogu movie perhaps the best chance of a live-action reprisal. Will there be a The Mandalorian Season 4? Lucasfilm has yet to say, but if it does happen, perhaps Boba Fett would pop up there.In truth, the future of Boba Fett and Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays him, in the Star Wars franchise remains uncertain. And based on recent comments from Morrison himself, there is little reason to deviate from that position.PlaySpeaking in an interview with Collider to promote his new film, Ka Whawhai Tonu, the 64-year-old New Zealander said he felt "sad" not to have reprised the role since the end of The Book of Boba Fett.“WhereThe Book of Boba Fett Season 2? Where the hell is Season 2?" Morrison said. "I know they're doing Ahsoka Season 2. I'm going, 'Ah, where's my Season 2?'"According to Collider, Morrison revealed he actually pitched Lucasfilm on Boba Fett appearing in Ahsoka Season 2, pointing out that he plays not just Boba Fett but all the clones based upon the character.He also bumped into Star Wars stewards Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau recently, and reminded them Boba Fett still exists. Apparently “they kind of said, 'Well, well,' they didn't want to say too much, put it that way. There was a few whispers of — they didn't want to say too much — but they just left it at that."That exchange left Morrison feeling like "I've been preserved for a later date, and I'm going to be tastier." He compared his feeling following the encounter to going to grandma’s house and seeing “that preservative jar of peaches up on the shelf.”Every Upcoming Star Wars Movie and TV Show“That's what I think,” he continued. “I'm one of those peaches, and I've been put up on the shelf. I've been preserved for a later date, and I'm going to be tastier.”Morrison could be playing coy, knowing full well he’s coming back to Star Wars in some form. After all, Rosario Dawson had no idea Mark Hamill was returning as Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian until he walked on set. Lucasfilm has a history of holding its cards close to its chest.But it does sound to me like nothing is in the works for Boba Fett, unfortunately, and indeed last year Morrison offered a reason for why that might be the case. Speaking at the From Clone Troopers to Bounty Hunters panel at Fan Expo Chicago, Morrison cited The Book of Boba Fett's poor reception as the reason for the once beloved character not returning in Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu. He added that Star Wars owner Disney hadn’t asked him to appear in the incoming film or a second season of The Book of Boba Fett.The show, which told the story of Boba Fett as he escaped from the Sarlacc Pit and acted as a miniature season of The Mandalorian, was among the worst received Star Wars shows. "This show's reception does seem to have impacted the future of the character in the franchise," Morrison said at the time. That was in August 2024. Has something changed in the year since? I'm not sure.Morrison originally played Jango Fett in Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones but years later rejoined Star Wars as Jango's son and clone Boba Fett. He's made clear his desire to return to Star Wars, saying he wants a chunk of The Mandalorian's time just as The Mandalorian led an episode of his show.Photo by Jun Sato/WireImage.Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
    #temuera #morrison #says #he039s #039sad039
    Temuera Morrison Says He's 'Sad' Not to Have Played Boba Fett Since the Divisive Disney+ show The Book of Boba Fett: 'I've Been Preserved for a Later Date'
    What’s happening with Boba Fett? The last time we saw the legendary Star Wars character was at the end of his own show, The Book of Boba Fett, in February 2022. Yes, the Disney+ spin-off series was divisive, with some Star Wars fans feeling it went too far in softening the iconic villain's character. But that can’t be it for Boba Fett, can it?Over three years later, it feels like The Book of Boba Fett Season 2 is stuck in a galaxy far, far away. Lucasfilm has given no indication that the show will return, with next year’s The Mandalorian & Grogu movie perhaps the best chance of a live-action reprisal. Will there be a The Mandalorian Season 4? Lucasfilm has yet to say, but if it does happen, perhaps Boba Fett would pop up there.In truth, the future of Boba Fett and Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays him, in the Star Wars franchise remains uncertain. And based on recent comments from Morrison himself, there is little reason to deviate from that position.PlaySpeaking in an interview with Collider to promote his new film, Ka Whawhai Tonu, the 64-year-old New Zealander said he felt "sad" not to have reprised the role since the end of The Book of Boba Fett.“WhereThe Book of Boba Fett Season 2? Where the hell is Season 2?" Morrison said. "I know they're doing Ahsoka Season 2. I'm going, 'Ah, where's my Season 2?'"According to Collider, Morrison revealed he actually pitched Lucasfilm on Boba Fett appearing in Ahsoka Season 2, pointing out that he plays not just Boba Fett but all the clones based upon the character.He also bumped into Star Wars stewards Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau recently, and reminded them Boba Fett still exists. Apparently “they kind of said, 'Well, well,' they didn't want to say too much, put it that way. There was a few whispers of — they didn't want to say too much — but they just left it at that."That exchange left Morrison feeling like "I've been preserved for a later date, and I'm going to be tastier." He compared his feeling following the encounter to going to grandma’s house and seeing “that preservative jar of peaches up on the shelf.”Every Upcoming Star Wars Movie and TV Show“That's what I think,” he continued. “I'm one of those peaches, and I've been put up on the shelf. I've been preserved for a later date, and I'm going to be tastier.”Morrison could be playing coy, knowing full well he’s coming back to Star Wars in some form. After all, Rosario Dawson had no idea Mark Hamill was returning as Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian until he walked on set. Lucasfilm has a history of holding its cards close to its chest.But it does sound to me like nothing is in the works for Boba Fett, unfortunately, and indeed last year Morrison offered a reason for why that might be the case. Speaking at the From Clone Troopers to Bounty Hunters panel at Fan Expo Chicago, Morrison cited The Book of Boba Fett's poor reception as the reason for the once beloved character not returning in Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu. He added that Star Wars owner Disney hadn’t asked him to appear in the incoming film or a second season of The Book of Boba Fett.The show, which told the story of Boba Fett as he escaped from the Sarlacc Pit and acted as a miniature season of The Mandalorian, was among the worst received Star Wars shows. "This show's reception does seem to have impacted the future of the character in the franchise," Morrison said at the time. That was in August 2024. Has something changed in the year since? I'm not sure.Morrison originally played Jango Fett in Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones but years later rejoined Star Wars as Jango's son and clone Boba Fett. He's made clear his desire to return to Star Wars, saying he wants a chunk of The Mandalorian's time just as The Mandalorian led an episode of his show.Photo by Jun Sato/WireImage.Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me. #temuera #morrison #says #he039s #039sad039
    WWW.IGN.COM
    Temuera Morrison Says He's 'Sad' Not to Have Played Boba Fett Since the Divisive Disney+ show The Book of Boba Fett: 'I've Been Preserved for a Later Date'
    What’s happening with Boba Fett? The last time we saw the legendary Star Wars character was at the end of his own show, The Book of Boba Fett, in February 2022. Yes, the Disney+ spin-off series was divisive, with some Star Wars fans feeling it went too far in softening the iconic villain's character. But that can’t be it for Boba Fett, can it?Over three years later, it feels like The Book of Boba Fett Season 2 is stuck in a galaxy far, far away. Lucasfilm has given no indication that the show will return, with next year’s The Mandalorian & Grogu movie perhaps the best chance of a live-action reprisal. Will there be a The Mandalorian Season 4? Lucasfilm has yet to say, but if it does happen, perhaps Boba Fett would pop up there.In truth, the future of Boba Fett and Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays him, in the Star Wars franchise remains uncertain. And based on recent comments from Morrison himself, there is little reason to deviate from that position.PlaySpeaking in an interview with Collider to promote his new film, Ka Whawhai Tonu (In The Fire of War), the 64-year-old New Zealander said he felt "sad" not to have reprised the role since the end of The Book of Boba Fett.“Where [sic] The Book of Boba Fett Season 2? Where the hell is Season 2?" Morrison said. "I know they're doing Ahsoka Season 2. I'm going, 'Ah, where's my Season 2?'"According to Collider, Morrison revealed he actually pitched Lucasfilm on Boba Fett appearing in Ahsoka Season 2 ("can I be Rex and take his helmet off, please?"), pointing out that he plays not just Boba Fett but all the clones based upon the character.He also bumped into Star Wars stewards Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau recently, and reminded them Boba Fett still exists. Apparently “they kind of said, 'Well, well,' they didn't want to say too much, put it that way. There was a few whispers of — they didn't want to say too much — but they just left it at that."That exchange left Morrison feeling like "I've been preserved for a later date, and I'm going to be tastier." He compared his feeling following the encounter to going to grandma’s house and seeing “that preservative jar of peaches up on the shelf.”Every Upcoming Star Wars Movie and TV Show“That's what I think,” he continued. “I'm one of those peaches, and I've been put up on the shelf. I've been preserved for a later date, and I'm going to be tastier.”Morrison could be playing coy, knowing full well he’s coming back to Star Wars in some form. After all, Rosario Dawson had no idea Mark Hamill was returning as Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian until he walked on set. Lucasfilm has a history of holding its cards close to its chest.But it does sound to me like nothing is in the works for Boba Fett, unfortunately, and indeed last year Morrison offered a reason for why that might be the case. Speaking at the From Clone Troopers to Bounty Hunters panel at Fan Expo Chicago, Morrison cited The Book of Boba Fett's poor reception as the reason for the once beloved character not returning in Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu. He added that Star Wars owner Disney hadn’t asked him to appear in the incoming film or a second season of The Book of Boba Fett.The show, which told the story of Boba Fett as he escaped from the Sarlacc Pit and acted as a miniature season of The Mandalorian, was among the worst received Star Wars shows. "This show's reception does seem to have impacted the future of the character in the franchise," Morrison said at the time. That was in August 2024. Has something changed in the year since? I'm not sure.Morrison originally played Jango Fett in Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones but years later rejoined Star Wars as Jango's son and clone Boba Fett. He's made clear his desire to return to Star Wars, saying he wants a chunk of The Mandalorian's time just as The Mandalorian led an episode of his show.Photo by Jun Sato/WireImage.Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
    0 Comentários 0 Compartilhamentos
  • Too big, fail too

    Inside Apple’s high-gloss standoff with AI ambition and the uncanny choreography of WWDC 2025There was a time when watching an Apple keynote — like Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007, the masterclass of all masterclasses in product launching — felt like watching a tightrope act. There was suspense. Live demos happened — sometimes they failed, and when they didn’t, the applause was real, not piped through a Dolby mix.These days, that tension is gone. Since 2020, in the wake of the pandemic, Apple events have become pre-recorded masterworks: drone shots sweeping over Apple Park, transitions smoother than a Pixar short, and executives delivering their lines like odd, IRL spatial personas. They move like human renderings: poised, confident, and just robotic enough to raise a brow. The kind of people who, if encountered in real life, would probably light up half a dozen red flags before a handshake is even offered. A case in point: the official “Liquid Glass” UI demo — it’s visually stunning, yes, but also uncanny, like a concept reel that forgot it needed to ship. that’s the paradox. Not only has Apple trimmed down the content of WWDC, it’s also polished the delivery into something almost inhumanly controlled. Every keynote beat feels engineered to avoid risk, reduce friction, and glide past doubt. But in doing so, something vital slips away: the tension, the spontaneity, the sense that the future is being made, not just performed.Just one year earlier, WWDC 2024 opened with a cinematic cold open “somewhere over California”: Schiller piloting an Apple-branded plane, iPod in hand, muttering “I’m getting too old for this stuff.” A perfect mix of Lethal Weapon camp and a winking message that yes, Classic-Apple was still at the controls — literally — flying its senior leadership straight toward Cupertino. Out the hatch, like high-altitude paratroopers of optimism, leapt the entire exec team, with Craig Federighi, always the go-to for Apple’s auto-ironic set pieces, leading the charge, donning a helmet literally resembling his own legendary mane. It was peak-bold, bizarre, and unmistakably Apple. That intro now reads like the final act of full-throttle confidence.This year’s WWDC offered a particularly crisp contrast. Aside from the new intro — which features Craig Federighi drifting an F1-style race car across the inner rooftop ring of Apple Park as a “therapy session”, a not-so-subtle nod to the upcoming Formula 1 blockbuster but also to the accountability for the failure to deliver the system-wide AI on time — WWDC 2025 pulled back dramatically. The new “Apple Intelligence” was introduced in a keynote with zero stumbles, zero awkward transitions, and visuals so pristine they could have been rendered on a Vision Pro. Not only had the scope of WWDC been trimmed down to safer talking points, but even the tone had shifted — less like a tech summit, more like a handsomely lit containment-mode seminar. And that, perhaps, was the problem. The presentation wasn’t a reveal — it was a performance. And performances can be edited in post. Demos can’t.So when Apple in march 2025 quietly admitted, for the first time, in a formal press release addressed to reporters like John Gruber, that the personalized Siri and system-wide AI features would be delayed — the reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something subtler: disillusionment. Gruber’s response cracked the façade wide open. His post opened a slow but persistent wave of unease, rippling through developer Slack channels and private comment threads alike. John Gruber’s reaction, published under the headline “Something is rotten in the State of Cupertino”, was devastating. His critique opened the floodgates to a wave of murmurs and public unease among developers and insiders, many of whom had begun to question what was really happening at the helm of key divisions central to Apple’s future.Many still believe Apple is the only company truly capable of pulling off hardware-software integrated AI at scale. But there’s a sense that the company is now operating in damage-control mode. The delay didn’t just push back a feature — it disrupted the entire strategic arc of WWDC 2025. What could have been a milestone in system-level AI became a cautious sidestep, repackaged through visual polish and feature tweaks. The result: a presentation focused on UI refinements and safe bets, far removed from the sweeping revolution that had been teased as the main selling point for promoting the iPhone 16 launch, “Built for Apple Intelligence”.That tension surfaced during Joanna Stern’s recent live interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. These are two of Apple’s most media-savvy execs, and yet, in a setting where questions weren’t scripted, you could see the seams. Their usual fluency gave way to something stiffer. More careful. Less certain. And even the absences speak volumes: for the first time in a decade, no one from Apple’s top team joined John Gruber’s Talk Show at WWDC. It wasn’t a scheduling fluke — nor a petty retaliation for Gruber’s damning March article. It was a retreat — one that Stratechery’s Ben Thompson described as exactly that: a strategic fallback, not a brave reset.Meanwhile, the keynote narrative quietly shifted from AI ambition to UI innovation: new visual effects, tighter integration, call screening. Credit here goes to Alan Dye — Apple VP of Human Interface Design and one of the last remaining members of Jony Ive’s inner circle not yet absorbed into LoveFrom — whose long-arc work on interface aesthetics, from the early stages of the Dynamic Island onward, is finally starting to click into place. This is classic Apple: refinement as substance, design as coherence. But it was meant to be the cherry on top of a much deeper AI-system transformation — not the whole sundae. All useful. All safe. And yet, the thing that Apple could uniquely deliver — a seamless, deeply integrated, user-controlled and privacy-safe Apple Intelligence — is now the thing it seems most reluctant to show.There is no doubt the groundwork has been laid. And to Apple’s credit, Jason Snell notes that the company is shifting gears, scaling ambitions to something that feels more tangible. But in scaling back the risk, something else has been scaled back too: the willingness to look your audience of stakeholders, developers and users live, in the eye, and show the future for how you have carefully crafted it and how you can put it in the market immediately, or in mere weeks. Showing things as they are, or as they will be very soon. Rehearsed, yes, but never faked.Even James Dyson’s live demo of a new vacuum showed more courage. No camera cuts. No soft lighting. Just a human being, showing a thing. It might have sucked, literally or figuratively. But it didn’t. And it stuck. That’s what feels missing in Cupertino.Some have started using the term glasslighting — a coined pun blending Apple’s signature glassy aesthetics with the soft manipulations of marketing, like a gentle fog of polished perfection that leaves expectations quietly disoriented. It’s not deception. It’s damage control. But that instinct, understandable as it is, doesn’t build momentum. It builds inertia. And inertia doesn’t sell intelligence. It only delays the reckoning.Before the curtain falls, it’s hard not to revisit the uncanny polish of Apple’s speakers presence. One might start to wonder whether Apple is really late on AI — or whether it’s simply developed such a hyper-advanced internal model that its leadership team has been replaced by real-time human avatars, flawlessly animated, fed directly by the Neural Engine. Not the constrained humanity of two floating eyes behind an Apple Vision headset, but full-on flawless embodiment — if this is Apple’s augmented AI at work, it may be the only undisclosed and underpromised demo actually shipping.OS30 live demoMeanwhile, just as Apple was soft-pedaling its A.I. story with maximum visual polish, a very different tone landed from across the bay: Sam Altman and Jony Ive, sitting in a bar, talking about the future. stage. No teleprompter. No uncanny valley. Just two “old friends”, with one hell of a budget, quietly sketching the next era of computing. A vision Apple once claimed effortlessly.There’s still the question of whether Apple, as many hope, can reclaim — and lock down — that leadership for itself. A healthy dose of competition, at the very least, can only help.Too big, fail too was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
    #too #big #fail
    Too big, fail too
    Inside Apple’s high-gloss standoff with AI ambition and the uncanny choreography of WWDC 2025There was a time when watching an Apple keynote — like Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007, the masterclass of all masterclasses in product launching — felt like watching a tightrope act. There was suspense. Live demos happened — sometimes they failed, and when they didn’t, the applause was real, not piped through a Dolby mix.These days, that tension is gone. Since 2020, in the wake of the pandemic, Apple events have become pre-recorded masterworks: drone shots sweeping over Apple Park, transitions smoother than a Pixar short, and executives delivering their lines like odd, IRL spatial personas. They move like human renderings: poised, confident, and just robotic enough to raise a brow. The kind of people who, if encountered in real life, would probably light up half a dozen red flags before a handshake is even offered. A case in point: the official “Liquid Glass” UI demo — it’s visually stunning, yes, but also uncanny, like a concept reel that forgot it needed to ship. that’s the paradox. Not only has Apple trimmed down the content of WWDC, it’s also polished the delivery into something almost inhumanly controlled. Every keynote beat feels engineered to avoid risk, reduce friction, and glide past doubt. But in doing so, something vital slips away: the tension, the spontaneity, the sense that the future is being made, not just performed.Just one year earlier, WWDC 2024 opened with a cinematic cold open “somewhere over California”: Schiller piloting an Apple-branded plane, iPod in hand, muttering “I’m getting too old for this stuff.” A perfect mix of Lethal Weapon camp and a winking message that yes, Classic-Apple was still at the controls — literally — flying its senior leadership straight toward Cupertino. Out the hatch, like high-altitude paratroopers of optimism, leapt the entire exec team, with Craig Federighi, always the go-to for Apple’s auto-ironic set pieces, leading the charge, donning a helmet literally resembling his own legendary mane. It was peak-bold, bizarre, and unmistakably Apple. That intro now reads like the final act of full-throttle confidence.This year’s WWDC offered a particularly crisp contrast. Aside from the new intro — which features Craig Federighi drifting an F1-style race car across the inner rooftop ring of Apple Park as a “therapy session”, a not-so-subtle nod to the upcoming Formula 1 blockbuster but also to the accountability for the failure to deliver the system-wide AI on time — WWDC 2025 pulled back dramatically. The new “Apple Intelligence” was introduced in a keynote with zero stumbles, zero awkward transitions, and visuals so pristine they could have been rendered on a Vision Pro. Not only had the scope of WWDC been trimmed down to safer talking points, but even the tone had shifted — less like a tech summit, more like a handsomely lit containment-mode seminar. And that, perhaps, was the problem. The presentation wasn’t a reveal — it was a performance. And performances can be edited in post. Demos can’t.So when Apple in march 2025 quietly admitted, for the first time, in a formal press release addressed to reporters like John Gruber, that the personalized Siri and system-wide AI features would be delayed — the reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something subtler: disillusionment. Gruber’s response cracked the façade wide open. His post opened a slow but persistent wave of unease, rippling through developer Slack channels and private comment threads alike. John Gruber’s reaction, published under the headline “Something is rotten in the State of Cupertino”, was devastating. His critique opened the floodgates to a wave of murmurs and public unease among developers and insiders, many of whom had begun to question what was really happening at the helm of key divisions central to Apple’s future.Many still believe Apple is the only company truly capable of pulling off hardware-software integrated AI at scale. But there’s a sense that the company is now operating in damage-control mode. The delay didn’t just push back a feature — it disrupted the entire strategic arc of WWDC 2025. What could have been a milestone in system-level AI became a cautious sidestep, repackaged through visual polish and feature tweaks. The result: a presentation focused on UI refinements and safe bets, far removed from the sweeping revolution that had been teased as the main selling point for promoting the iPhone 16 launch, “Built for Apple Intelligence”.That tension surfaced during Joanna Stern’s recent live interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. These are two of Apple’s most media-savvy execs, and yet, in a setting where questions weren’t scripted, you could see the seams. Their usual fluency gave way to something stiffer. More careful. Less certain. And even the absences speak volumes: for the first time in a decade, no one from Apple’s top team joined John Gruber’s Talk Show at WWDC. It wasn’t a scheduling fluke — nor a petty retaliation for Gruber’s damning March article. It was a retreat — one that Stratechery’s Ben Thompson described as exactly that: a strategic fallback, not a brave reset.Meanwhile, the keynote narrative quietly shifted from AI ambition to UI innovation: new visual effects, tighter integration, call screening. Credit here goes to Alan Dye — Apple VP of Human Interface Design and one of the last remaining members of Jony Ive’s inner circle not yet absorbed into LoveFrom — whose long-arc work on interface aesthetics, from the early stages of the Dynamic Island onward, is finally starting to click into place. This is classic Apple: refinement as substance, design as coherence. But it was meant to be the cherry on top of a much deeper AI-system transformation — not the whole sundae. All useful. All safe. And yet, the thing that Apple could uniquely deliver — a seamless, deeply integrated, user-controlled and privacy-safe Apple Intelligence — is now the thing it seems most reluctant to show.There is no doubt the groundwork has been laid. And to Apple’s credit, Jason Snell notes that the company is shifting gears, scaling ambitions to something that feels more tangible. But in scaling back the risk, something else has been scaled back too: the willingness to look your audience of stakeholders, developers and users live, in the eye, and show the future for how you have carefully crafted it and how you can put it in the market immediately, or in mere weeks. Showing things as they are, or as they will be very soon. Rehearsed, yes, but never faked.Even James Dyson’s live demo of a new vacuum showed more courage. No camera cuts. No soft lighting. Just a human being, showing a thing. It might have sucked, literally or figuratively. But it didn’t. And it stuck. That’s what feels missing in Cupertino.Some have started using the term glasslighting — a coined pun blending Apple’s signature glassy aesthetics with the soft manipulations of marketing, like a gentle fog of polished perfection that leaves expectations quietly disoriented. It’s not deception. It’s damage control. But that instinct, understandable as it is, doesn’t build momentum. It builds inertia. And inertia doesn’t sell intelligence. It only delays the reckoning.Before the curtain falls, it’s hard not to revisit the uncanny polish of Apple’s speakers presence. One might start to wonder whether Apple is really late on AI — or whether it’s simply developed such a hyper-advanced internal model that its leadership team has been replaced by real-time human avatars, flawlessly animated, fed directly by the Neural Engine. Not the constrained humanity of two floating eyes behind an Apple Vision headset, but full-on flawless embodiment — if this is Apple’s augmented AI at work, it may be the only undisclosed and underpromised demo actually shipping.OS30 live demoMeanwhile, just as Apple was soft-pedaling its A.I. story with maximum visual polish, a very different tone landed from across the bay: Sam Altman and Jony Ive, sitting in a bar, talking about the future. stage. No teleprompter. No uncanny valley. Just two “old friends”, with one hell of a budget, quietly sketching the next era of computing. A vision Apple once claimed effortlessly.There’s still the question of whether Apple, as many hope, can reclaim — and lock down — that leadership for itself. A healthy dose of competition, at the very least, can only help.Too big, fail too was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story. #too #big #fail
    UXDESIGN.CC
    Too big, fail too
    Inside Apple’s high-gloss standoff with AI ambition and the uncanny choreography of WWDC 2025There was a time when watching an Apple keynote — like Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007, the masterclass of all masterclasses in product launching — felt like watching a tightrope act. There was suspense. Live demos happened — sometimes they failed, and when they didn’t, the applause was real, not piped through a Dolby mix.These days, that tension is gone. Since 2020, in the wake of the pandemic, Apple events have become pre-recorded masterworks: drone shots sweeping over Apple Park, transitions smoother than a Pixar short, and executives delivering their lines like odd, IRL spatial personas. They move like human renderings: poised, confident, and just robotic enough to raise a brow. The kind of people who, if encountered in real life, would probably light up half a dozen red flags before a handshake is even offered. A case in point: the official “Liquid Glass” UI demo — it’s visually stunning, yes, but also uncanny, like a concept reel that forgot it needed to ship.https://medium.com/media/fcb3b16cc42621ba32153aff80ea1805/hrefAnd that’s the paradox. Not only has Apple trimmed down the content of WWDC, it’s also polished the delivery into something almost inhumanly controlled. Every keynote beat feels engineered to avoid risk, reduce friction, and glide past doubt. But in doing so, something vital slips away: the tension, the spontaneity, the sense that the future is being made, not just performed.Just one year earlier, WWDC 2024 opened with a cinematic cold open “somewhere over California”:https://medium.com/media/f97f45387353363264d99c341d4571b0/hrefPhil Schiller piloting an Apple-branded plane, iPod in hand, muttering “I’m getting too old for this stuff.” A perfect mix of Lethal Weapon camp and a winking message that yes, Classic-Apple was still at the controls — literally — flying its senior leadership straight toward Cupertino. Out the hatch, like high-altitude paratroopers of optimism, leapt the entire exec team, with Craig Federighi, always the go-to for Apple’s auto-ironic set pieces, leading the charge, donning a helmet literally resembling his own legendary mane. It was peak-bold, bizarre, and unmistakably Apple. That intro now reads like the final act of full-throttle confidence.This year’s WWDC offered a particularly crisp contrast. Aside from the new intro — which features Craig Federighi drifting an F1-style race car across the inner rooftop ring of Apple Park as a “therapy session”, a not-so-subtle nod to the upcoming Formula 1 blockbuster but also to the accountability for the failure to deliver the system-wide AI on time — WWDC 2025 pulled back dramatically. The new “Apple Intelligence” was introduced in a keynote with zero stumbles, zero awkward transitions, and visuals so pristine they could have been rendered on a Vision Pro. Not only had the scope of WWDC been trimmed down to safer talking points, but even the tone had shifted — less like a tech summit, more like a handsomely lit containment-mode seminar. And that, perhaps, was the problem. The presentation wasn’t a reveal — it was a performance. And performances can be edited in post. Demos can’t.So when Apple in march 2025 quietly admitted, for the first time, in a formal press release addressed to reporters like John Gruber, that the personalized Siri and system-wide AI features would be delayed — the reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something subtler: disillusionment. Gruber’s response cracked the façade wide open. His post opened a slow but persistent wave of unease, rippling through developer Slack channels and private comment threads alike. John Gruber’s reaction, published under the headline “Something is rotten in the State of Cupertino”, was devastating. His critique opened the floodgates to a wave of murmurs and public unease among developers and insiders, many of whom had begun to question what was really happening at the helm of key divisions central to Apple’s future.Many still believe Apple is the only company truly capable of pulling off hardware-software integrated AI at scale. But there’s a sense that the company is now operating in damage-control mode. The delay didn’t just push back a feature — it disrupted the entire strategic arc of WWDC 2025. What could have been a milestone in system-level AI became a cautious sidestep, repackaged through visual polish and feature tweaks. The result: a presentation focused on UI refinements and safe bets, far removed from the sweeping revolution that had been teased as the main selling point for promoting the iPhone 16 launch, “Built for Apple Intelligence”.That tension surfaced during Joanna Stern’s recent live interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. These are two of Apple’s most media-savvy execs, and yet, in a setting where questions weren’t scripted, you could see the seams. Their usual fluency gave way to something stiffer. More careful. Less certain. And even the absences speak volumes: for the first time in a decade, no one from Apple’s top team joined John Gruber’s Talk Show at WWDC. It wasn’t a scheduling fluke — nor a petty retaliation for Gruber’s damning March article. It was a retreat — one that Stratechery’s Ben Thompson described as exactly that: a strategic fallback, not a brave reset.Meanwhile, the keynote narrative quietly shifted from AI ambition to UI innovation: new visual effects, tighter integration, call screening. Credit here goes to Alan Dye — Apple VP of Human Interface Design and one of the last remaining members of Jony Ive’s inner circle not yet absorbed into LoveFrom — whose long-arc work on interface aesthetics, from the early stages of the Dynamic Island onward, is finally starting to click into place. This is classic Apple: refinement as substance, design as coherence. But it was meant to be the cherry on top of a much deeper AI-system transformation — not the whole sundae. All useful. All safe. And yet, the thing that Apple could uniquely deliver — a seamless, deeply integrated, user-controlled and privacy-safe Apple Intelligence — is now the thing it seems most reluctant to show.There is no doubt the groundwork has been laid. And to Apple’s credit, Jason Snell notes that the company is shifting gears, scaling ambitions to something that feels more tangible. But in scaling back the risk, something else has been scaled back too: the willingness to look your audience of stakeholders, developers and users live, in the eye, and show the future for how you have carefully crafted it and how you can put it in the market immediately, or in mere weeks. Showing things as they are, or as they will be very soon. Rehearsed, yes, but never faked.Even James Dyson’s live demo of a new vacuum showed more courage. No camera cuts. No soft lighting. Just a human being, showing a thing. It might have sucked, literally or figuratively. But it didn’t. And it stuck. That’s what feels missing in Cupertino.Some have started using the term glasslighting — a coined pun blending Apple’s signature glassy aesthetics with the soft manipulations of marketing, like a gentle fog of polished perfection that leaves expectations quietly disoriented. It’s not deception. It’s damage control. But that instinct, understandable as it is, doesn’t build momentum. It builds inertia. And inertia doesn’t sell intelligence. It only delays the reckoning.Before the curtain falls, it’s hard not to revisit the uncanny polish of Apple’s speakers presence. One might start to wonder whether Apple is really late on AI — or whether it’s simply developed such a hyper-advanced internal model that its leadership team has been replaced by real-time human avatars, flawlessly animated, fed directly by the Neural Engine. Not the constrained humanity of two floating eyes behind an Apple Vision headset, but full-on flawless embodiment — if this is Apple’s augmented AI at work, it may be the only undisclosed and underpromised demo actually shipping.OS30 live demoMeanwhile, just as Apple was soft-pedaling its A.I. story with maximum visual polish, a very different tone landed from across the bay: Sam Altman and Jony Ive, sitting in a bar, talking about the future.https://medium.com/media/5cdea73d7fde0b538e038af1990afa44/hrefNo stage. No teleprompter. No uncanny valley. Just two “old friends”, with one hell of a budget, quietly sketching the next era of computing. A vision Apple once claimed effortlessly.There’s still the question of whether Apple, as many hope, can reclaim — and lock down — that leadership for itself. A healthy dose of competition, at the very least, can only help.Too big, fail too was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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  • Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground

    Tech Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground A jet-powered flying bike that combines speed, agility, and futuristic design
    Published
    June 1, 2025 6:00am EDT close Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground Soar above traffc in the air with ease. Imagine gliding through city traffic, not stuck in traffic jams on the road, but soaring above them in the air with ease. The Volonaut Airbike, a jet-powered flying bike developed by Polish entrepreneur Tomasz Patan, is turning this vision into reality. With a top speed of 124 mph and a frame that is seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, this innovative vehicle could change the way we get around in cities, making travel faster and easier. Jet-powered flying bike Jet power and featherweight designUnlike many personal flying devices that depend on large, noisy propellers, the Volonaut Airbike uses a jet propulsion system. While the exact technical details have not been disclosed, the Airbike's design emphasizes extreme lightness and agility.CHINESE WEARABLE EVTOL JETPACK MAKES HISTORIC FIRST FLIGHTExtensive use of carbon fiber and 3D-printed parts allows the vehicle to weigh just 86 pounds without a rider. This is approximately seven times lighter than an average motorcycle, which typically weighs around 600 pounds. This featherweight construction makes the Airbike nimble and efficient in the air. Jet-powered flying bike Performance and featuresThe Volonaut Airbike can reach speeds of up to 124 miles per hour, making it faster than most motorcycles in traffic. It features a proprietary stabilization system enhanced by a flight computer, which automatically maintains hover and provides ease of control for the rider. This technology allows even those with limited flying experience to handle the bike safely and confidently. The Airbike's open, roofless design offers the rider an unobstructed 360-degree view, creating a sense of complete freedom and immersion in the flying experience. Additionally, the absence of spinning propellers means the Airbike can navigate through tight spaces with greater ease and safety. Jet-powered flying bike A real-life flying bike inspired by imaginationThe Volonaut Airbike's sleek, futuristic silhouette and compact size evoke the image of a flying motorcycle that many have dreamed about for years. Its design and performance bring to life a concept often seen in movies and stories about the future of transportation. Volonaut's promotional videos even feature a rider dressed as a Stormtrooper, highlighting the bike's resemblance to the flying vehicles of popular culture. This playful nod underscores the Airbike's blend of cutting-edge technology and imaginative design. Jet-powered flying bike Meet the inventor: Tomasz PatanTomasz Patan is a visionary engineer with a talent for creating groundbreaking airborne vehicles. He is best known for the Jetson One, a quad-rotor electric vertical take-off and landingdrone that can carry a human pilot. Building on the success of that project, Patan has now introduced the Volonaut Airbike, a smaller, more agile flying machine that relies on jet propulsion rather than propellers. His work continues to push the boundaries of what personal flight can achieve. Jet-powered flying bike What about the cost?When it comes to price, the Volonaut Airbike is still something of a mystery. Patan has not yet revealed an official cost, but if you look at his previous project, the Jetson One drone, which was priced at around you can get a rough idea of where the Airbike might land. Given the advanced materials, jet propulsion and sophisticated flight computer involved, it's safe to assume this won't be a budget-friendly ride. However, as with most new technologies, prices often come down over time as production scales up and designs are refined. So, while it might start out as a high-end gadget for early adopters and enthusiasts, there's hope that flying bikes like this could become more accessible in the years ahead.WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Jet-powered flying bike What lies ahead for the Volonaut Airbike?Although the Volonaut Airbike has already been demonstrated in flight, many details remain undisclosed. Patan has not yet revealed the exact propulsion technology, pricing or release date, but he has expressed optimism the Airbike will be available to the public in the near future. As development continues, this flying motorcycle could soon become a practical option for urban commuters seeking a faster, more flexible way to travel. Jet-powered flying bike Kurt's key takeawaysHonestly, the Volonaut Airbike feels like something we've all dreamed about but never thought we'd actually see. It's exciting to watch this blend of bold engineering and creative design come to life, making personal flight more real than ever before. Sure, it might be a bit pricey at first, but who knows? Maybe in a few years, zipping through the skies on a flying bike will be just as normal as hopping on a motorcycle today.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPWould you feel comfortable trading your motorcycle for a flying bike that soars above city traffic? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/ContactFor more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to coverFollow Kurt on his social channelsAnswers to the most asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com.  All rights reserved.   Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.
    #flying #motorcycle #zooms #mph #without
    Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground
    Tech Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground A jet-powered flying bike that combines speed, agility, and futuristic design Published June 1, 2025 6:00am EDT close Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground Soar above traffc in the air with ease. Imagine gliding through city traffic, not stuck in traffic jams on the road, but soaring above them in the air with ease. The Volonaut Airbike, a jet-powered flying bike developed by Polish entrepreneur Tomasz Patan, is turning this vision into reality. With a top speed of 124 mph and a frame that is seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, this innovative vehicle could change the way we get around in cities, making travel faster and easier. Jet-powered flying bike Jet power and featherweight designUnlike many personal flying devices that depend on large, noisy propellers, the Volonaut Airbike uses a jet propulsion system. While the exact technical details have not been disclosed, the Airbike's design emphasizes extreme lightness and agility.CHINESE WEARABLE EVTOL JETPACK MAKES HISTORIC FIRST FLIGHTExtensive use of carbon fiber and 3D-printed parts allows the vehicle to weigh just 86 pounds without a rider. This is approximately seven times lighter than an average motorcycle, which typically weighs around 600 pounds. This featherweight construction makes the Airbike nimble and efficient in the air. Jet-powered flying bike Performance and featuresThe Volonaut Airbike can reach speeds of up to 124 miles per hour, making it faster than most motorcycles in traffic. It features a proprietary stabilization system enhanced by a flight computer, which automatically maintains hover and provides ease of control for the rider. This technology allows even those with limited flying experience to handle the bike safely and confidently. The Airbike's open, roofless design offers the rider an unobstructed 360-degree view, creating a sense of complete freedom and immersion in the flying experience. Additionally, the absence of spinning propellers means the Airbike can navigate through tight spaces with greater ease and safety. Jet-powered flying bike A real-life flying bike inspired by imaginationThe Volonaut Airbike's sleek, futuristic silhouette and compact size evoke the image of a flying motorcycle that many have dreamed about for years. Its design and performance bring to life a concept often seen in movies and stories about the future of transportation. Volonaut's promotional videos even feature a rider dressed as a Stormtrooper, highlighting the bike's resemblance to the flying vehicles of popular culture. This playful nod underscores the Airbike's blend of cutting-edge technology and imaginative design. Jet-powered flying bike Meet the inventor: Tomasz PatanTomasz Patan is a visionary engineer with a talent for creating groundbreaking airborne vehicles. He is best known for the Jetson One, a quad-rotor electric vertical take-off and landingdrone that can carry a human pilot. Building on the success of that project, Patan has now introduced the Volonaut Airbike, a smaller, more agile flying machine that relies on jet propulsion rather than propellers. His work continues to push the boundaries of what personal flight can achieve. Jet-powered flying bike What about the cost?When it comes to price, the Volonaut Airbike is still something of a mystery. Patan has not yet revealed an official cost, but if you look at his previous project, the Jetson One drone, which was priced at around you can get a rough idea of where the Airbike might land. Given the advanced materials, jet propulsion and sophisticated flight computer involved, it's safe to assume this won't be a budget-friendly ride. However, as with most new technologies, prices often come down over time as production scales up and designs are refined. So, while it might start out as a high-end gadget for early adopters and enthusiasts, there's hope that flying bikes like this could become more accessible in the years ahead.WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? Jet-powered flying bike What lies ahead for the Volonaut Airbike?Although the Volonaut Airbike has already been demonstrated in flight, many details remain undisclosed. Patan has not yet revealed the exact propulsion technology, pricing or release date, but he has expressed optimism the Airbike will be available to the public in the near future. As development continues, this flying motorcycle could soon become a practical option for urban commuters seeking a faster, more flexible way to travel. Jet-powered flying bike Kurt's key takeawaysHonestly, the Volonaut Airbike feels like something we've all dreamed about but never thought we'd actually see. It's exciting to watch this blend of bold engineering and creative design come to life, making personal flight more real than ever before. Sure, it might be a bit pricey at first, but who knows? Maybe in a few years, zipping through the skies on a flying bike will be just as normal as hopping on a motorcycle today.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPWould you feel comfortable trading your motorcycle for a flying bike that soars above city traffic? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/ContactFor more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to coverFollow Kurt on his social channelsAnswers to the most asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com.  All rights reserved.   Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com. #flying #motorcycle #zooms #mph #without
    WWW.FOXNEWS.COM
    Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground
    Tech Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground A jet-powered flying bike that combines speed, agility, and futuristic design Published June 1, 2025 6:00am EDT close Flying motorcycle zooms at 124 mph without touching the ground Soar above traffc in the air with ease. Imagine gliding through city traffic, not stuck in traffic jams on the road, but soaring above them in the air with ease. The Volonaut Airbike, a jet-powered flying bike developed by Polish entrepreneur Tomasz Patan, is turning this vision into reality. With a top speed of 124 mph and a frame that is seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, this innovative vehicle could change the way we get around in cities, making travel faster and easier. Jet-powered flying bike  (Volonaut)Jet power and featherweight designUnlike many personal flying devices that depend on large, noisy propellers, the Volonaut Airbike uses a jet propulsion system. While the exact technical details have not been disclosed, the Airbike's design emphasizes extreme lightness and agility.CHINESE WEARABLE EVTOL JETPACK MAKES HISTORIC FIRST FLIGHTExtensive use of carbon fiber and 3D-printed parts allows the vehicle to weigh just 86 pounds without a rider. This is approximately seven times lighter than an average motorcycle, which typically weighs around 600 pounds. This featherweight construction makes the Airbike nimble and efficient in the air. Jet-powered flying bike  (Volonaut)Performance and featuresThe Volonaut Airbike can reach speeds of up to 124 miles per hour, making it faster than most motorcycles in traffic. It features a proprietary stabilization system enhanced by a flight computer, which automatically maintains hover and provides ease of control for the rider. This technology allows even those with limited flying experience to handle the bike safely and confidently. The Airbike's open, roofless design offers the rider an unobstructed 360-degree view, creating a sense of complete freedom and immersion in the flying experience. Additionally, the absence of spinning propellers means the Airbike can navigate through tight spaces with greater ease and safety. Jet-powered flying bike  (Volonaut)A real-life flying bike inspired by imaginationThe Volonaut Airbike's sleek, futuristic silhouette and compact size evoke the image of a flying motorcycle that many have dreamed about for years. Its design and performance bring to life a concept often seen in movies and stories about the future of transportation. Volonaut's promotional videos even feature a rider dressed as a Stormtrooper, highlighting the bike's resemblance to the flying vehicles of popular culture. This playful nod underscores the Airbike's blend of cutting-edge technology and imaginative design. Jet-powered flying bike  (Volonaut)Meet the inventor: Tomasz PatanTomasz Patan is a visionary engineer with a talent for creating groundbreaking airborne vehicles. He is best known for the Jetson One, a quad-rotor electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) drone that can carry a human pilot. Building on the success of that project, Patan has now introduced the Volonaut Airbike, a smaller, more agile flying machine that relies on jet propulsion rather than propellers. His work continues to push the boundaries of what personal flight can achieve. Jet-powered flying bike  (Volonaut)What about the cost?When it comes to price, the Volonaut Airbike is still something of a mystery. Patan has not yet revealed an official cost, but if you look at his previous project, the Jetson One drone, which was priced at around $92,000, you can get a rough idea of where the Airbike might land. Given the advanced materials, jet propulsion and sophisticated flight computer involved, it's safe to assume this won't be a budget-friendly ride. However, as with most new technologies, prices often come down over time as production scales up and designs are refined. So, while it might start out as a high-end gadget for early adopters and enthusiasts, there's hope that flying bikes like this could become more accessible in the years ahead.WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? Jet-powered flying bike  (Volonaut)What lies ahead for the Volonaut Airbike?Although the Volonaut Airbike has already been demonstrated in flight, many details remain undisclosed. Patan has not yet revealed the exact propulsion technology, pricing or release date, but he has expressed optimism the Airbike will be available to the public in the near future. As development continues, this flying motorcycle could soon become a practical option for urban commuters seeking a faster, more flexible way to travel. Jet-powered flying bike  (Volonaut)Kurt's key takeawaysHonestly, the Volonaut Airbike feels like something we've all dreamed about but never thought we'd actually see. It's exciting to watch this blend of bold engineering and creative design come to life, making personal flight more real than ever before. Sure, it might be a bit pricey at first, but who knows? Maybe in a few years, zipping through the skies on a flying bike will be just as normal as hopping on a motorcycle today.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPWould you feel comfortable trading your motorcycle for a flying bike that soars above city traffic? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/ContactFor more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to coverFollow Kurt on his social channelsAnswers to the most asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com.  All rights reserved.   Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.
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  • RT HUXLEY®: A Necro Trooper proving its worth. #art #scifi #soldier

    RT HUXLEY®A Necro Trooper proving its worth.#art #scifi #soldier
    #huxley #necro #trooper #proving #its
    RT HUXLEY®: A Necro Trooper proving its worth. #art #scifi #soldier
    RT HUXLEY®A Necro Trooper proving its worth.#art #scifi #soldier #huxley #necro #trooper #proving #its
    X.COM
    RT HUXLEY®: A Necro Trooper proving its worth. #art #scifi #soldier
    RT HUXLEY®A Necro Trooper proving its worth.#art #scifi #soldier
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  • Days of Play 2025 comes to PlayStation Store May 28

    The Days of Play celebration comes to PlayStation Store, featuring numerous games all available at discount for a limited time*, starting May 28! You can get a preview of just some of the titles** that’ll be included ahead of the promotion’s go-live time right here.

    The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle, WWE 2K25 Standard Edition, Astro Bot, The Last of Us Part II Remasteredand Red Dead Redemption 2. 

    The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle, WWE 2K25 Standard Edition, Astro Botand The Last of Us Part II Remastered. 

    The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle, WWE 2K25 Standard Edition, Astro Botand The Last of Us Part II Remastered. 

    And there are many more games beyond the titles listed below. When the dedicated promotion page goes live on PlayStation Store on May 28, head there to see the full list and find out your regional discount pricing. 

    And there’s plenty more Days of Play related-celebrations to enjoy! Check out the full range of activities, offers and more in the Days of Play announcement post. 

    A Plague Tale: Innocence

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    AI LIMIT Deluxe Edition

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    DayZ Cool Edition

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    Dishonored® Definitive Edition

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    DOOM Eternal Standard Edition

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    Grand Theft Auto V: Premium Edition

    Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition

    GRIS

    GTA Online: Megalodon Shark Cash Card

    Guilty Gear -Strive-

    Hades

    Harold Halibut

    Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions

    Have a Nice Death

    Heavenly Bodies

    Heavy Cargo – The Truck Simulator

    Hell Let Loose

    High On Life

    High On Life + DLC Bundle

    Highway Police Simulator

    HITMAN 3 – Trinity Pack

    HITMAN World of Assassination – Deluxe Edition

    Horizon Chase 2

    Horizon Forbidden West™ Complete Edition

    HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED™ 2 – Turbocharged

    HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED™ 2 – Turbocharged – Deluxe Edition

    HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED™ 2 – Turbocharged – Legendary Edition

    HUMANITY

    Immortals of Aveum™ Deluxe Edition

    Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

    Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Premium Edition

    INDIKA

    Infernax

    Infinity Strash: DRAGON QUEST The Adventure of Dai

    Insurgency: Sandstorm

    Insurgency: Sandstorm – Gold Edition

    It Takes Two

    Jak and Daxter Bundle

    Jurassic World Evolution: Return to Jurassic Park

    Kena: Bridge of Spirits

    Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition

    Killer Klowns From Outer Space: Digital Deluxe Edition

    Killer Klowns From Outer Space: The Game

    Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

    Kingdom Come: Deliverance Royal Edition

    L.A. Noire

    LEGO® Harry Potter™ Collection

    LEGO® 2K Drive

    LEGO® 2K Drive Awesome Rivals Edition

    LEGO® Batman™ 3: Beyond Gotham

    LEGO® Harry Potter™ Collection

    LEGO® Horizon Adventures™

    LEGO® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga

    LEGO® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga Galactic Edition

    Life is Strange: Double Exposure Deluxe Edition

    Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth

    Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Ultimate Edition

    LIVE A LIVE

    Lords of the Fallen

    Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

    Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness

    Mafia: Definitive Edition

    Mafia: Trilogy

    Maneater

    Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

    Marvel’s Midnight Suns Enhanced Edition

    Marvel’s Midnight Suns Legendary Edition

    Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Digital Deluxe Edition

    Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE Plus

    Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE Plus – Digital Deluxe Edition

    Matchbox™ Driving Adventures

    Metaphor: ReFantazio

    Metro Awakening

    Metro Awakening + Arizona Sunshine® 2

    Metro Exodus: Gold Edition

    Metro Saga Bundle

    Minecraft Dungeons: Ultimate Edition

    Minecraft Legends

    Minecraft Legends Deluxe Edition

    MLB® The Show™ 25

    Monster Energy Supercross 25 – Special Edition

    Monster Energy Supercross 25 – The Official Video Game

    Monster Energy Supercross 25 X Monster Jam™ Showdown – Dirt Master Edition

    Monster High™ Skulltimate Secrets™

    Monster Jam™ Showdown

    Monster Jam™ Showdown – Big Air Edition

    Moonlighter

    Moonscars

    Mortal Kombat™ 1

    Mortal Shell

    Mortal Shell: The Virtuous Cycle

    MotoGP™25

    Moving Out

    MudRunner – American Wilds Edition

    MX vs ATV Legends

    MX vs ATV Legends – 2024 AMA Pro Motocross Championship

    My Friend Peppa Pig

    My Little Pony: A Zephyr Heights Mystery

    NARUTO X BORUTO Ultimate Ninja STORM CONNECTIONS

    NARUTO X BORUTO Ultimate Ninja STORM CONNECTIONS Ultimate Edition

    NBA 2K25 All-Star Edition

    NBA 2K25 Tournament Edition

    Need for Speed™ Unbound

    Need for Speed™ Unbound Ultimate Collection

    NEO: The World Ends with You

    Neon White

    Neva

    New Tales from the Borderlands

    Nick Jr. Party Adventure

    Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway

    NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139…

    NieR: Automata™ Game of the YoRHa Edition

    Nine Sols

    No Man’s Sky

    Nobody Wants to Die

    OCTOPATH TRAVELER II

    Oddworld: Soulstorm Enhanced Edition

    ON THE ROAD – The Truck Simulator

    Onee Chanbara Origin

    Outer Wilds

    Overcooked! All You Can Eat

    Pacific Drive

    PAW Patrol Mighty Pups Adventure Bay

    PAW Patrol: Grand Prix

    PAYDAY 3

    PGA TOUR 2K25

    PGA TOUR 2K25 Legend Edition

    Phasmophobia

    Planet Coaster 2: Deluxe Edition

    Police Simulator: Patrol Officers: Gold Edition

    Quake 1 & 2 Bundle

    Railway Empire 2

    Ravenswatch

    Red Dead Online

    Red Dead Redemption

    Remnant II® – Standard Edition

    Remnant II® – Ultimate Edition

    Remnant: From the Ashes

    REVEIL

    REVEIL – Funhouse Edition

    Rez Infinite

    RIDE 5

    RIDE 5 – Special Edition

    Riders Republic™ 360 Edition

    Riders Republic™ Skate Edition

    Risk of Rain

    Risk of Rain 2

    Road Maintenance Simulator 2 + Winter Services

    Road Redemption

    Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders

    Rogue Waters

    Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven

    Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered

    Rugby 25

    Saints Row

    Saints Row Gold Edition

    SAMURAI MAIDEN

    SAND LAND Deluxe Edition

    Sayonara Wild Hearts

    Sea of Thieves

    Sea of Thieves: 2025 Premium Edition

    SEASON: A letter to the future

    SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS

    Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition

    Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice

    Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice – Deluxe Edition

    Shredders

    Shredders – 540INDY Edition

    Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

    Sid Meier’s Civilization® VII

    Sid Meier’s Civilization® VII Deluxe Edition

    Sifu

    Skull and Bones Premium Edition

    SKULL AND BONES™

    Skyrim Anniversary Edition + Fallout 4 G.O.T.Y Bundle

    Sledders

    Slime Rancher

    Slime Rancher 2

    Slitterhead

    Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 Complete Edition

    Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts Full Arsenal Edition

    SnowRunner – 2-Year Anniversary Edition

    SnowRunner – 4-Year Anniversary Edition

    Solar Ash

    Songs of Conquest

    SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY!

    SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY! Digital Deluxe

    SpellForce III Reforced

    SpellForce III Reforced: Complete Edition

    SpongeBob SquarePants™: The Patrick Star Game

    STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor™

    Star Wars Outlaws

    Star Wars Outlaws Ultimate Edition

    STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ Ultimate Edition

    STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ II

    STAR WARS™ Jedi Cross-Gen Bundle Edition

    STAR WARS™: Dark Forces Remaster

    STAR WARS™: Squadrons

    Starship Troopers: Extermination

    Stellaris: Console Edition

    Still Wakes the Deep

    Stranded Deep

    Stray

    Subnautica

    Subnautica: Below Zero

    Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

    Surviving Mars

    Survivor – Castaway Island

    SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream

    SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream Premium Edition

    SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada

    SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada Ultimate Edition

    Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival The Setlist Edition

    Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter

    Tales of Graces f Remastered Deluxe Edition

    Tales of Kenzera™: ZAU

    Taxi Life – Supporter Edition

    Tchia

    Teardown

    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge

    TEKKEN 8

    TEKKEN 8 Season 2 Ultimate Edition

    Temtem

    Terminator: Resistance

    Terminator: Resistance Enhanced

    Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – Gold Edition

    Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – Silver Streets Edition

    Tetris® Effect: Connected

    Thank Goodness You’re Here!

    The 7th Guest VR

    The Arkane Collection

    The Case of the Golden Idol

    The Crew Motorfest Deluxe Edition

    The Crew Motorfest Gold Edition

    The Elder Scrolls Online

    The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition

    The Escapists 2 – Game of the Year Edition

    The Evil Within 2

    THE FOREST

    THE KING OF FIGHTERS XV Standard Edition

    THE KING OF FIGHTERS XV Ultimate Edition

    The Last of Us Part II

    The Last of Us Part II Digital Deluxe Edition

    The Last of Us™ Part I

    The Last of Us™ Part II Remastered

    The Quarry

    The Sims™ 4 Cats and Dogs Plus My First Pet Stuff Bundle

    The Sims™ 4 Get Famous

    The Sims™ 4 High School Years Expansion Pack

    The Sims™ 4 Horse Ranch Expansion Pack

    The Sims™ 4 Lovestruck Expansion Pack

    The Smurfs – Mission Vileaf

    The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

    The Stone of Madness

    The Stone of Madness Special Edition

    The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

    The Thing: Remastered

    The Walking Dead: A New Frontier

    The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

    The Wizards: Dark Times – Brotherhood

    theHunter: Call of the Wild™

    Thief: Master Thief Edition

    Thumper

    TIEBREAK+: Official Game of the ATP and WTA

    Tintin Reporter – Cigars of the Pharaoh

    Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: Chaotic Great Edition

    Titan Quest

    Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

    Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – Ultimate Edition

    Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft

    Tomb Raider I-VI Remastered

    Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered

    Tomb Raider: Definitive Survivor Trilogy

    Tomb Raider: Legend

    TopSpin 2K25 Cross-Gen Digital Edition

    TopSpin 2K25 Grand Slam® Edition

    Torchlight II

    Torchlight III

    Towers of Aghasba

    Townsmen VR

    Train Sim World® 5: Special Edition

    TRANSFORMERS: EARTHSPARK – Expedition

    Trepang2

    Tropico 6 – Next Gen Edition

    Trover Saves the Universe

    Truck and Logistics Simulator

    Truck Simulator Cargo Driver 2024 – EURO

    TUNIC

    Turok Trilogy Bundle

    UFO ROBOT GRENDIZER – The Feast of the Wolves

    UFO ROBOT GRENDIZER – The Feast of the Wolves – Deluxe Edition

    UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH II Sys:Celes Deluxe Edition

    Undisputed

    Unknown 9: Awakening

    Unpacking

    UNRAILED!

    Untitled Goose Game

    V Rising Legacy of Castlevania Edition

    Viewfinder

    Visions of Mana

    Way of the Hunter

    Welcome to ParadiZe – Zombot Edition

    What Remains of Edith Finch

    Wolfenstein: The Two-Pack

    Wolfenstein® II: The New Colossus™

    World War Z

    World War Z: Aftermath

    Worms Armageddon: Anniversary Edition

    Worms W.M.D

    Wreckfest – Complete Edition

    WrestleQuest

    WWE 2K25 Standard Edition

    WWE 2K25 The Bloodline Edition

    Ys Origin

    Zero Escape: The Nonary Games

    *The Days of Play 2025 promotion on PlayStation Store starts May 28 at 00.00AM PDT/BST/JST and ends June 11 at 23:59 PDT/BST/JST.**Games and discounts may differ by region. Please check your local PlayStation Store page at go-live. 
    #days #play #comes #playstation #store
    Days of Play 2025 comes to PlayStation Store May 28
    The Days of Play celebration comes to PlayStation Store, featuring numerous games all available at discount for a limited time*, starting May 28! You can get a preview of just some of the titles** that’ll be included ahead of the promotion’s go-live time right here. The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle, WWE 2K25 Standard Edition, Astro Bot, The Last of Us Part II Remasteredand Red Dead Redemption 2.  The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle, WWE 2K25 Standard Edition, Astro Botand The Last of Us Part II Remastered.  The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle, WWE 2K25 Standard Edition, Astro Botand The Last of Us Part II Remastered.  And there are many more games beyond the titles listed below. When the dedicated promotion page goes live on PlayStation Store on May 28, head there to see the full list and find out your regional discount pricing.  And there’s plenty more Days of Play related-celebrations to enjoy! Check out the full range of activities, offers and more in the Days of Play announcement post.  A Plague Tale: Innocence A Plague Tale: Requiem After the Fall® – Complete Edition Agatha Christie – Murder on the Orient Express Age of Mythology: Retold Standard Edition Age of Wonders 4 AI LIMIT AI LIMIT Deluxe Edition AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative Airport Police Contraband Simulator – Border Patrol Akimbot Alan Wake 2 Deluxe Edition Alan Wake Remastered Alien: Isolation – THE COLLECTION Alien: Rogue Incursion VR Deluxe Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator Amerzone – The Explorer’s Legacy ANIMAL WELL Another Crab’s Treasure Arcade Paradise Arizona Sunshine® 2 Deluxe Edition Arizona Sunshine® Remake Arma Reforger Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Deluxe Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Ragnarök Edition Assassin’s Creed® IV Black Flag™ Assassin’s Creed® Mirage Deluxe Edition Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey Deluxe Edition Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey Gold Edition Assetto Corsa ASTRO BOT ASTRO BOT Digital Deluxe Edition ASTRONEER: Glitchwalkers Edition Atomfall Atomic Heart Atomic Heart – Premium Edition Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Deluxe Edition Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora™ Gold Edition Back 4 Blood: Standard Edition Back 4 Blood: Ultimate Edition Balatro Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden Bassmaster® Fishing: 2022 Bassmaster Classic® Batman: Arkham Collection Battlefield™ 2042 Ben 10: Power Trip Bendy and the Dark Revival Bendy and the Ink Machine Bendy: Studio Collection Beyond Galaxyland Bionic Bay BioShock: The Collection Blasphemous Blasphemous + Blasphemous 2 Bundle Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain Bluey: The Videogame Bomb Rush Cyberfunk Borderlands 3 Borderlands 3 Super Deluxe Edition Bratz™: Flaunt Your Fashion Bugsnax Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition Bus Simulator Bus Simulator 21 Next Stop – Gold Edition Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle Call of the Wild: The Angler™ – Ultimate Fishing Bundle Capes CARRION Cat Quest III CATAN® – Console Edition Deluxe Chicory: A Colorful Tale Children of Morta: Complete Edition Cities: Skylines – Mayor’s Edition Cities: Skylines – Premium Edition 2 Citizen Sleeper CityDriver COCOON CONSCRIPT – Digital Deluxe Edition Construction Simulator Construction Simulator – Gold Edition Control: Ultimate Edition Coral Island Creed: Rise to Glory – Championship Edition™ CRISIS CORE -FINAL FANTASY VII- REUNION DIGITAL DELUXE EDITION Croc Legend of the Gobbos Crow Country Crusader Kings III: Royal Edition Cult of the Lamb Cyberpunk 2077 Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition Dakar Desert Rally Dakar Desert Rally – Deluxe Edition Danganronpa 1•2 Reload Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Darkest Dungeon II Darkest Dungeon II: Oblivion Edition Darkest Dungeon® DayZ DayZ Cool Edition DayZ Frostline Dead Cells Dead Island 2 Dead Island Definitive Edition Dead Space DEATH NOTE Killer Within DEATHLOOP Deep Rock Galactic Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Digital Deluxe Edition Devil May Cry 5 Deluxe + Vergil Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition Devil May Cry HD Collection & 4SE Bundle Dishonored 2 Dishonored® Definitive Edition Dishonored®: Death of the Outsider™ – Deluxe Bundle Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed DISSIDIA® FINAL FANTASY® NT DOOM DOOM Eternal Standard Edition Dragon Age™: The Veilguard DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS 2 DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D Remake DRAGON QUEST XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive Edition DREDGE DREDGE: Expansion Bundle Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour Dungeons 4 Dying Light Dying Light 2 Stay Human EA SPORTS FC™ 25 Standard Edition EA SPORTS™ Madden NFL 25 EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 5 EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6 EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: WORLD BROTHERS 2 Deluxe Edition Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Empire of the Ants ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist Endling – Extinction is Forever Eternights Expeditions: A MudRunner Game Expeditions: A MudRunner Game – Supreme Edition Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition Fallout 76 Far Cry Primal Far Cry New Dawn Deluxe Edition FF7R EPISODE INTERmissionFINAL FANTASY I-VI Bundle FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH Digital Deluxe Edition FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE & REBIRTH Twin Pack FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE INTERGRADE Fire Pro Wrestling World Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2 Forever Skies Forklift Simulator Forza Horizon 5 Premium Edition Forza Horizon 5 Standard Edition Funko Fusion Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed Ecto Edition Ghostrunner Ghostrunner 2 Ghostrunner 2 Brutal Edition Ghostwire: Tokyo Goat Simulator 3 Goat Simulator: Remastered Goat Simulator: The GOATY Golf With Your Friends – Ultimate Edition Goodbye Volcano High Gotham Knights Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising Standard Edition Grand Theft Auto V Grand Theft Auto V: Premium Edition Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition GRIS GTA Online: Megalodon Shark Cash Card Guilty Gear -Strive- Hades Harold Halibut Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions Have a Nice Death Heavenly Bodies Heavy Cargo – The Truck Simulator Hell Let Loose High On Life High On Life + DLC Bundle Highway Police Simulator HITMAN 3 – Trinity Pack HITMAN World of Assassination – Deluxe Edition Horizon Chase 2 Horizon Forbidden West™ Complete Edition HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED™ 2 – Turbocharged HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED™ 2 – Turbocharged – Deluxe Edition HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED™ 2 – Turbocharged – Legendary Edition HUMANITY Immortals of Aveum™ Deluxe Edition Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Premium Edition INDIKA Infernax Infinity Strash: DRAGON QUEST The Adventure of Dai Insurgency: Sandstorm Insurgency: Sandstorm – Gold Edition It Takes Two Jak and Daxter Bundle Jurassic World Evolution: Return to Jurassic Park Kena: Bridge of Spirits Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition Killer Klowns From Outer Space: Digital Deluxe Edition Killer Klowns From Outer Space: The Game Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Kingdom Come: Deliverance Royal Edition L.A. Noire LEGO® Harry Potter™ Collection LEGO® 2K Drive LEGO® 2K Drive Awesome Rivals Edition LEGO® Batman™ 3: Beyond Gotham LEGO® Harry Potter™ Collection LEGO® Horizon Adventures™ LEGO® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga LEGO® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga Galactic Edition Life is Strange: Double Exposure Deluxe Edition Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Ultimate Edition LIVE A LIVE Lords of the Fallen Lorelei and the Laser Eyes Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness Mafia: Definitive Edition Mafia: Trilogy Maneater Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Marvel’s Midnight Suns Enhanced Edition Marvel’s Midnight Suns Legendary Edition Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Digital Deluxe Edition Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE Plus Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE Plus – Digital Deluxe Edition Matchbox™ Driving Adventures Metaphor: ReFantazio Metro Awakening Metro Awakening + Arizona Sunshine® 2 Metro Exodus: Gold Edition Metro Saga Bundle Minecraft Dungeons: Ultimate Edition Minecraft Legends Minecraft Legends Deluxe Edition MLB® The Show™ 25 Monster Energy Supercross 25 – Special Edition Monster Energy Supercross 25 – The Official Video Game Monster Energy Supercross 25 X Monster Jam™ Showdown – Dirt Master Edition Monster High™ Skulltimate Secrets™ Monster Jam™ Showdown Monster Jam™ Showdown – Big Air Edition Moonlighter Moonscars Mortal Kombat™ 1 Mortal Shell Mortal Shell: The Virtuous Cycle MotoGP™25 Moving Out MudRunner – American Wilds Edition MX vs ATV Legends MX vs ATV Legends – 2024 AMA Pro Motocross Championship My Friend Peppa Pig My Little Pony: A Zephyr Heights Mystery NARUTO X BORUTO Ultimate Ninja STORM CONNECTIONS NARUTO X BORUTO Ultimate Ninja STORM CONNECTIONS Ultimate Edition NBA 2K25 All-Star Edition NBA 2K25 Tournament Edition Need for Speed™ Unbound Need for Speed™ Unbound Ultimate Collection NEO: The World Ends with You Neon White Neva New Tales from the Borderlands Nick Jr. Party Adventure Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… NieR: Automata™ Game of the YoRHa Edition Nine Sols No Man’s Sky Nobody Wants to Die OCTOPATH TRAVELER II Oddworld: Soulstorm Enhanced Edition ON THE ROAD – The Truck Simulator Onee Chanbara Origin Outer Wilds Overcooked! All You Can Eat Pacific Drive PAW Patrol Mighty Pups Adventure Bay PAW Patrol: Grand Prix PAYDAY 3 PGA TOUR 2K25 PGA TOUR 2K25 Legend Edition Phasmophobia Planet Coaster 2: Deluxe Edition Police Simulator: Patrol Officers: Gold Edition Quake 1 & 2 Bundle Railway Empire 2 Ravenswatch Red Dead Online Red Dead Redemption Remnant II® – Standard Edition Remnant II® – Ultimate Edition Remnant: From the Ashes REVEIL REVEIL – Funhouse Edition Rez Infinite RIDE 5 RIDE 5 – Special Edition Riders Republic™ 360 Edition Riders Republic™ Skate Edition Risk of Rain Risk of Rain 2 Road Maintenance Simulator 2 + Winter Services Road Redemption Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders Rogue Waters Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Remastered Rugby 25 Saints Row Saints Row Gold Edition SAMURAI MAIDEN SAND LAND Deluxe Edition Sayonara Wild Hearts Sea of Thieves Sea of Thieves: 2025 Premium Edition SEASON: A letter to the future SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice Shadow Tactics: Aiko’s Choice – Deluxe Edition Shredders Shredders – 540INDY Edition Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Sid Meier’s Civilization® VII Sid Meier’s Civilization® VII Deluxe Edition Sifu Skull and Bones Premium Edition SKULL AND BONES™ Skyrim Anniversary Edition + Fallout 4 G.O.T.Y Bundle Sledders Slime Rancher Slime Rancher 2 Slitterhead Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 Complete Edition Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts Full Arsenal Edition SnowRunner – 2-Year Anniversary Edition SnowRunner – 4-Year Anniversary Edition Solar Ash Songs of Conquest SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY! SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY! Digital Deluxe SpellForce III Reforced SpellForce III Reforced: Complete Edition SpongeBob SquarePants™: The Patrick Star Game STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor™ Star Wars Outlaws Star Wars Outlaws Ultimate Edition STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ Ultimate Edition STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ II STAR WARS™ Jedi Cross-Gen Bundle Edition STAR WARS™: Dark Forces Remaster STAR WARS™: Squadrons Starship Troopers: Extermination Stellaris: Console Edition Still Wakes the Deep Stranded Deep Stray Subnautica Subnautica: Below Zero Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Surviving Mars Survivor – Castaway Island SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream SWORD ART ONLINE Fractured Daydream Premium Edition SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada Ultimate Edition Taiko no Tatsujin: Rhythm Festival The Setlist Edition Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter Tales of Graces f Remastered Deluxe Edition Tales of Kenzera™: ZAU Taxi Life – Supporter Edition Tchia Teardown Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge TEKKEN 8 TEKKEN 8 Season 2 Ultimate Edition Temtem Terminator: Resistance Terminator: Resistance Enhanced Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – Gold Edition Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – Silver Streets Edition Tetris® Effect: Connected Thank Goodness You’re Here! The 7th Guest VR The Arkane Collection The Case of the Golden Idol The Crew Motorfest Deluxe Edition The Crew Motorfest Gold Edition The Elder Scrolls Online The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition The Escapists 2 – Game of the Year Edition The Evil Within 2 THE FOREST THE KING OF FIGHTERS XV Standard Edition THE KING OF FIGHTERS XV Ultimate Edition The Last of Us Part II The Last of Us Part II Digital Deluxe Edition The Last of Us™ Part I The Last of Us™ Part II Remastered The Quarry The Sims™ 4 Cats and Dogs Plus My First Pet Stuff Bundle The Sims™ 4 Get Famous The Sims™ 4 High School Years Expansion Pack The Sims™ 4 Horse Ranch Expansion Pack The Sims™ 4 Lovestruck Expansion Pack The Smurfs – Mission Vileaf The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe The Stone of Madness The Stone of Madness Special Edition The Texas Chain Saw Massacre The Thing: Remastered The Walking Dead: A New Frontier The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt The Wizards: Dark Times – Brotherhood theHunter: Call of the Wild™ Thief: Master Thief Edition Thumper TIEBREAK+: Official Game of the ATP and WTA Tintin Reporter – Cigars of the Pharaoh Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: Chaotic Great Edition Titan Quest Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – Ultimate Edition Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft Tomb Raider I-VI Remastered Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered Tomb Raider: Definitive Survivor Trilogy Tomb Raider: Legend TopSpin 2K25 Cross-Gen Digital Edition TopSpin 2K25 Grand Slam® Edition Torchlight II Torchlight III Towers of Aghasba Townsmen VR Train Sim World® 5: Special Edition TRANSFORMERS: EARTHSPARK – Expedition Trepang2 Tropico 6 – Next Gen Edition Trover Saves the Universe Truck and Logistics Simulator Truck Simulator Cargo Driver 2024 – EURO TUNIC Turok Trilogy Bundle UFO ROBOT GRENDIZER – The Feast of the Wolves UFO ROBOT GRENDIZER – The Feast of the Wolves – Deluxe Edition UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH II Sys:Celes Deluxe Edition Undisputed Unknown 9: Awakening Unpacking UNRAILED! Untitled Goose Game V Rising Legacy of Castlevania Edition Viewfinder Visions of Mana Way of the Hunter Welcome to ParadiZe – Zombot Edition What Remains of Edith Finch Wolfenstein: The Two-Pack Wolfenstein® II: The New Colossus™ World War Z World War Z: Aftermath Worms Armageddon: Anniversary Edition Worms W.M.D Wreckfest – Complete Edition WrestleQuest WWE 2K25 Standard Edition WWE 2K25 The Bloodline Edition Ys Origin Zero Escape: The Nonary Games *The Days of Play 2025 promotion on PlayStation Store starts May 28 at 00.00AM PDT/BST/JST and ends June 11 at 23:59 PDT/BST/JST.**Games and discounts may differ by region. Please check your local PlayStation Store page at go-live.  #days #play #comes #playstation #store
    BLOG.PLAYSTATION.COM
    Days of Play 2025 comes to PlayStation Store May 28
    The Days of Play celebration comes to PlayStation Store, featuring numerous games all available at discount for a limited time*, starting May 28! You can get a preview of just some of the titles** that’ll be included ahead of the promotion’s go-live time right here. The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle (45% off), WWE 2K25 Standard Edition (30% off), Astro Bot (15% off), The Last of Us Part II Remastered (20% off) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (75% off).  The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle (45% off), WWE 2K25 Standard Edition (30% off), Astro Bot (17% off) and The Last of Us Part II Remastered (20% off).  The full list will include the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle (45% off), WWE 2K25 Standard Edition (30% off), Astro Bot (17% off) and The Last of Us Part II Remastered (20% off).  And there are many more games beyond the titles listed below. When the dedicated promotion page goes live on PlayStation Store on May 28, head there to see the full list and find out your regional discount pricing.  And there’s plenty more Days of Play related-celebrations to enjoy! Check out the full range of activities, offers and more in the Days of Play announcement post.  A Plague Tale: Innocence A Plague Tale: Requiem After the Fall® – Complete Edition Agatha Christie – Murder on the Orient Express Age of Mythology: Retold Standard Edition Age of Wonders 4 AI LIMIT AI LIMIT Deluxe Edition AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative Airport Police Contraband Simulator – Border Patrol Akimbot Alan Wake 2 Deluxe Edition Alan Wake Remastered Alien: Isolation – THE COLLECTION Alien: Rogue Incursion VR Deluxe Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator Amerzone – The Explorer’s Legacy ANIMAL WELL Another Crab’s Treasure Arcade Paradise Arizona Sunshine® 2 Deluxe Edition Arizona Sunshine® Remake Arma Reforger Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Deluxe Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Ragnarök Edition Assassin’s Creed® IV Black Flag™ Assassin’s Creed® Mirage Deluxe Edition Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey Deluxe Edition Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey Gold Edition Assetto Corsa 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Untitled Goose Game V Rising Legacy of Castlevania Edition Viewfinder Visions of Mana Way of the Hunter Welcome to ParadiZe – Zombot Edition What Remains of Edith Finch Wolfenstein: The Two-Pack Wolfenstein® II: The New Colossus™ World War Z World War Z: Aftermath Worms Armageddon: Anniversary Edition Worms W.M.D Wreckfest – Complete Edition WrestleQuest WWE 2K25 Standard Edition WWE 2K25 The Bloodline Edition Ys Origin Zero Escape: The Nonary Games *The Days of Play 2025 promotion on PlayStation Store starts May 28 at 00.00AM PDT/BST/JST and ends June 11 at 23:59 PDT/BST/JST.**Games and discounts may differ by region. Please check your local PlayStation Store page at go-live. 
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  • Best Assault Class Weapons in Battlefront 2

    The Assault class in Star Wars Battlefront 2 is the most common class to use because of their versatility, with Star Cards for boosts and abilities, as well as for the weapons that they hold. The Assault Class in Battlefront 2 has a large selection of weapons, and each of them can be extremely useful when fighting against Rebels, Stormtroopers, Sith, Jedi, and anything in between.
    #best #assault #class #weapons #battlefront
    Best Assault Class Weapons in Battlefront 2
    The Assault class in Star Wars Battlefront 2 is the most common class to use because of their versatility, with Star Cards for boosts and abilities, as well as for the weapons that they hold. The Assault Class in Battlefront 2 has a large selection of weapons, and each of them can be extremely useful when fighting against Rebels, Stormtroopers, Sith, Jedi, and anything in between. #best #assault #class #weapons #battlefront
    GAMERANT.COM
    Best Assault Class Weapons in Battlefront 2
    The Assault class in Star Wars Battlefront 2 is the most common class to use because of their versatility, with Star Cards for boosts and abilities, as well as for the weapons that they hold. The Assault Class in Battlefront 2 has a large selection of weapons, and each of them can be extremely useful when fighting against Rebels, Stormtroopers, Sith, Jedi, and anything in between.
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  • A definitive ranking of Tom Cruise’s 26 best action movies

    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, 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 aretense, 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. ValkyrieDirector: 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 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 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 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 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, 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 Phelpsin Mission: Impossible5. Julia Meadein Mission: Impossible III and Fallout4. Gracein Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning3. Nyah Nordoff-Hallin Mission: Impossible II2. Ilsa Faust in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning1. Jane Carterin in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

    21. American Made 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 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 

    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 troubleshootera 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. TapsDirector: 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, 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 

    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.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 ReckoningDirector: 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 trapA definitive ranking of Ethan Hunt’s “best friends/allies”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. Bogdan1. Luther15. War of the WorldsDirector: 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, 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 DayDirector: 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 FirmDirector. 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 GunDirector: 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 actionof 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 ThunderDirector: 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 ReckoningDirector: 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 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 

    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 

    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 firstM:I handler who carried over from one film to the next. Evaluating the handlers’ position in the franchiseis 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 Brasselin Mission: Impossible III5. Erika Sloanein Mission: Impossible – Fallout and The Final Reckoning4. Eugene Kittridgein Mission: Impossible3. John Musgravein Mission: Impossible III2. Commander Swanbeckin Mission: Impossible II1. Alan Hunleyin 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 ReportDirector: 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 Director: Brian De PalmaWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus

    Because MI:2 and MI:3 struggle with tone, 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-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 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. Birdfights 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 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 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 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- 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 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”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. 
    #definitive #ranking #tom #cruises #best
    A definitive ranking of Tom Cruise’s 26 best action movies
    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, 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 aretense, 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. ValkyrieDirector: 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 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 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 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 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, 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 Phelpsin Mission: Impossible5. Julia Meadein Mission: Impossible III and Fallout4. Gracein Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning3. Nyah Nordoff-Hallin Mission: Impossible II2. Ilsa Faust in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning1. Jane Carterin in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol 21. American Made 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 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  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 troubleshootera 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. TapsDirector: 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, 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  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.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 ReckoningDirector: 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 trapA definitive ranking of Ethan Hunt’s “best friends/allies”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. Bogdan1. Luther15. War of the WorldsDirector: 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, 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 DayDirector: 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 FirmDirector. 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 GunDirector: 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 actionof 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 ThunderDirector: 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 ReckoningDirector: 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 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  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  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 firstM:I handler who carried over from one film to the next. Evaluating the handlers’ position in the franchiseis 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 Brasselin Mission: Impossible III5. Erika Sloanein Mission: Impossible – Fallout and The Final Reckoning4. Eugene Kittridgein Mission: Impossible3. John Musgravein Mission: Impossible III2. Commander Swanbeckin Mission: Impossible II1. Alan Hunleyin 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 ReportDirector: 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 Director: Brian De PalmaWhere to watch: Free on Hulu, Paramount Plus Because MI:2 and MI:3 struggle with tone, 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-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 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. Birdfights 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 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 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 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- 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 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”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.  #definitive #ranking #tom #cruises #best
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    A definitive ranking of Tom Cruise’s 26 best action movies
    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. 
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  • 5 best Netflix war movies to watch on Memorial Day

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    Stream Charlie Wilson’s War on Netflix.
    Dune: Part TwoLe
    Director Denis Villeneuve has made plenty of films about violent conflict —2010’s Incendiesis about the Lebanese Civil War, and 2015’s Sicario is about a CIA strike against a drug cartel. An artistically minded Villeneuve is drawn to the elegant warfare of science fiction. His two-film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune tells the orange-saturated, visually stunning tale of an interplanetary war that is both technologically unsophisticated — our heroes fight with blades and crossbows — and high-tech.The action sequences in Dune: Part Two drift rather than rush and sweep rather than shudder. It’s war as a visual exercise, like a battle plan plotted on an otherworldly map.
    Stream Dune: Part Two on Netflix.
    Starship TroopersSony Pictures
    A more literal transposition of America’s imperialistic desert wars onto science fiction can be found in Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously dumb adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s crypto-fascistic 1959 novel. Verhoeven wanted to make a satire — a film about an expansionist human species defeating an insectoid alien species called the Arachnids. The goal was to question the militaristic undertones of twentieth-century sci-fi by seeming to espouse them. In Verhoeven’s words, the film’s characters are “fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.”
    This metafictional component of the story doesn’t entirely work because the movie lays on the stupidity too thick to be entirely satirical. However, Starship Troopers is a rare film that seems to profit from its shallowness. It was made for a popcorn era that seems to have faded, with Verhoeven’s trademark borderline-softcore love scenes and a castof surpassingly dopey gorgeousness.Stream Starship Troopers on Netflix.
    #best #netflix #war #movies #watch
    5 best Netflix war movies to watch on Memorial Day
    War is hell, but for the movies, it’s something more complicated. Some directors see war as a stylistic challenge, while others view it as an opportunity to drive home the trauma of the men and women on the ground. Netflix has a selection of war films spanning costume drama, science fiction, and recent history, all valuable in reflecting on the human drama of combat. We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+. Recommended Videos The KingPl A David Michôd-directed adaptation of several of Shakespeare’s history plays, The King was arguably the first big-budget film anchored solely by Timothée Chalamet, whose two Oscar nominations followed shortly thereafter. Chalamet, in his gruff-young-striver mode, plays the young King Henry V during his invasion of France as part of the Hundred Years’ War. The sword-clanging action is pleasurable, solid, and steely in places and realistically anti-climactic in others. Joel Edgerton, also a co-screenwriter, is Henry’s fictional drinking buddy Falstaff; most entertaining, though, is Robert Pattinson as Louis, the Dauphin of France, with an outrageous accent and a Lord Fauntleroy simper that make him a perfect foil to Chalamet. Stream The King on Netflix. Black Hawk DownCo If you prefer your war films jaw-rattling and glamor-less, Ridley Scott’s brutal verité will be right up your alley. In October 1993, the United States led a UN peacekeeping operation in Mogadishu to capture the leader of a Somali terrorist group. A Black Hawk helicopter carrying a contingent of American Special Forces was shot down over the insurgency-torn city. The men aboard were forced to fight their way out, and Hollywood came calling about eight years later. Black Hawk Down is suffused with eardrum-shattering gunfire and almost relentlessly unwilling to depict soldiery as anything but horrifying. A mile-long cast list led by Josh Hartnett heaves with sweat and anxiety. Stream Black Hawk Down on Netflix. Charlie Wilson’s WarRe Aaron Sorkin’s script for this Mike Nichols film, about the United States’ arming of the mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is Sorkinesque to its bones, down to the obligatory Gilbert and Sullivan reference.That’s why it’s so curious that the story has the air of being unfinished, leaping from the meddling of one wily Congressman Charlie Wilsonto its consequence — the attacks of 9/11, carried out by the very men the US had trained — without deigning to trace the line between points A and B. Still, the film, Nichols’ last, is delightful, an absurd exploration of the backroom kibitzing that populates battlefields. Stream Charlie Wilson’s War on Netflix. Dune: Part TwoLe Director Denis Villeneuve has made plenty of films about violent conflict —2010’s Incendiesis about the Lebanese Civil War, and 2015’s Sicario is about a CIA strike against a drug cartel. An artistically minded Villeneuve is drawn to the elegant warfare of science fiction. His two-film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune tells the orange-saturated, visually stunning tale of an interplanetary war that is both technologically unsophisticated — our heroes fight with blades and crossbows — and high-tech.The action sequences in Dune: Part Two drift rather than rush and sweep rather than shudder. It’s war as a visual exercise, like a battle plan plotted on an otherworldly map. Stream Dune: Part Two on Netflix. Starship TroopersSony Pictures A more literal transposition of America’s imperialistic desert wars onto science fiction can be found in Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously dumb adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s crypto-fascistic 1959 novel. Verhoeven wanted to make a satire — a film about an expansionist human species defeating an insectoid alien species called the Arachnids. The goal was to question the militaristic undertones of twentieth-century sci-fi by seeming to espouse them. In Verhoeven’s words, the film’s characters are “fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.” This metafictional component of the story doesn’t entirely work because the movie lays on the stupidity too thick to be entirely satirical. However, Starship Troopers is a rare film that seems to profit from its shallowness. It was made for a popcorn era that seems to have faded, with Verhoeven’s trademark borderline-softcore love scenes and a castof surpassingly dopey gorgeousness.Stream Starship Troopers on Netflix. #best #netflix #war #movies #watch
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    5 best Netflix war movies to watch on Memorial Day
    War is hell, but for the movies, it’s something more complicated. Some directors see war as a stylistic challenge, while others view it as an opportunity to drive home the trauma of the men and women on the ground. Netflix has a selection of war films spanning costume drama, science fiction, and recent history, all valuable in reflecting on the human drama of combat. We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+. Recommended Videos The King (2019) Pl A David Michôd-directed adaptation of several of Shakespeare’s history plays, The King was arguably the first big-budget film anchored solely by Timothée Chalamet, whose two Oscar nominations followed shortly thereafter. Chalamet, in his gruff-young-striver mode, plays the young King Henry V during his invasion of France as part of the Hundred Years’ War. The sword-clanging action is pleasurable, solid, and steely in places and realistically anti-climactic in others. Joel Edgerton, also a co-screenwriter, is Henry’s fictional drinking buddy Falstaff; most entertaining, though, is Robert Pattinson as Louis, the Dauphin of France, with an outrageous accent and a Lord Fauntleroy simper that make him a perfect foil to Chalamet. Stream The King on Netflix. Black Hawk Down (2001) Co If you prefer your war films jaw-rattling and glamor-less, Ridley Scott’s brutal verité will be right up your alley. In October 1993, the United States led a UN peacekeeping operation in Mogadishu to capture the leader of a Somali terrorist group. A Black Hawk helicopter carrying a contingent of American Special Forces was shot down over the insurgency-torn city. The men aboard were forced to fight their way out, and Hollywood came calling about eight years later. Black Hawk Down is suffused with eardrum-shattering gunfire and almost relentlessly unwilling to depict soldiery as anything but horrifying. A mile-long cast list led by Josh Hartnett heaves with sweat and anxiety. Stream Black Hawk Down on Netflix. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) Re Aaron Sorkin’s script for this Mike Nichols film, about the United States’ arming of the mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is Sorkinesque to its bones, down to the obligatory Gilbert and Sullivan reference. (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sclerotic CIA agent, roaring out his qualifications, finishes with “And I’m never ever sick at sea!”) That’s why it’s so curious that the story has the air of being unfinished, leaping from the meddling of one wily Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) to its consequence — the attacks of 9/11, carried out by the very men the US had trained — without deigning to trace the line between points A and B. Still, the film, Nichols’ last, is delightful, an absurd exploration of the backroom kibitzing that populates battlefields. Stream Charlie Wilson’s War on Netflix. Dune: Part Two (2024) Le Director Denis Villeneuve has made plenty of films about violent conflict —2010’s Incendies (2010) is about the Lebanese Civil War, and 2015’s Sicario is about a CIA strike against a drug cartel. An artistically minded Villeneuve is drawn to the elegant warfare of science fiction. His two-film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune tells the orange-saturated, visually stunning tale of an interplanetary war that is both technologically unsophisticated — our heroes fight with blades and crossbows — and high-tech. (The threat of nuclear warfare hovers.) The action sequences in Dune: Part Two drift rather than rush and sweep rather than shudder. It’s war as a visual exercise, like a battle plan plotted on an otherworldly map. Stream Dune: Part Two on Netflix. Starship Troopers (1997) Sony Pictures A more literal transposition of America’s imperialistic desert wars onto science fiction can be found in Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously dumb adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s crypto-fascistic 1959 novel. Verhoeven wanted to make a satire — a film about an expansionist human species defeating an insectoid alien species called the Arachnids. The goal was to question the militaristic undertones of twentieth-century sci-fi by seeming to espouse them. In Verhoeven’s words, the film’s characters are “fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.” This metafictional component of the story doesn’t entirely work because the movie lays on the stupidity too thick to be entirely satirical. However, Starship Troopers is a rare film that seems to profit from its shallowness. It was made for a popcorn era that seems to have faded, with Verhoeven’s trademark borderline-softcore love scenes and a cast (Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris) of surpassingly dopey gorgeousness. (Verhoeven says he cast the film to recall the preferred subjects of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi documentarian.) Stream Starship Troopers on Netflix.
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