Tag: movies

All hail Tom Cruise, the impossible entertainer

Of course, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is ridiculous. It’s preposterous and excessive and just so very, very much – and that’s kind of why I love it and Tom Cruise’s dogged, determined drive to entertain the hell out of us all for nearly 30 years, whether we want it or not.

It’s insane that Cruise has been playing gritty intelligent agent Ethan Hunt for 29 years. As a point of comparison, if Sean Connery had played James Bond as long as Cruise had played Hunt, he would’ve been in Bond movies from 1962 to 1991, well into his bearded balding Hunt for Red October/Untouchables elder statesman era.

The MI movies kicked off with Brian DePalma’s twisty, relatively restrained 1996 original, and derailed a bit with John Woo’s lavishly dated 1999 style overdose in Mission: Impossible 2.

But for me, the series staged a remarkable comeback beginning with 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, with the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sneering villain and Cruise’s Hunt given just a little more of a personality. Simon Pegg’s twitchy Benji and Ving Rhames’ sturdy Luther coalesced into the heart of a solid little team for Ethan, who is, as more than one character has noted, always going rogue or about to go rogue from his vaguely omnipresent Impossible Mission Force.

Cruise and his creative partner for most of the last few movies, director Christopher McQuarrie, settled into a solid routine of dastardly global threats, sneering villains and incredible stunt scenes that the rest of the plot basically is there to support.

The sixth instalment, 2018’s Mission Impossible: Fallout, reached an improbable high point for the series. This, Cruise whispered in audience ears as he bounced off mountain ranges and airplanes and ran, always ran, to the next plot point – this, is an action movie. 

To bring James Bond back again, Cruise quietly surpassed that franchise for reliable action thrills some time ago. While Daniel Craig starred in some of the best Bonds, studio meddling and creative fumbling also stuck him in some of the worst. Cruise and McQuarrie had a clear vision for their series. Even at the series’ nadir – John Woo, hello – a Mission: Impossible movie has never been less than a good time, check your brain at the door.

I like to think of what I call “the piano move” from 2023’s Dead Reckoning as a symbol of the series as a whole and its amiable desire to please. After surviving a pitched knife battle on the roof of a moving train, after that train then crashes off a cliff, after Ethan Hunt and partner clamber dangerously through the train cars before they fall into a canyon, after all that, in the final car, we see a piano, hanging on by a single strap, about to hurtle down through a train car and into Hunt and partner. Will that piano fall? You bet it will. In Ethan Hunt’s world, there’s always another piano about to fall on you. 

The best moments of the MI movies are nothing but piano moves, where Cruise fascinates you with his ingenuity and escape skills. I’d be dead about 5 seconds into trying to have a knife fight with a madman on the top of a moving train, for instance. For Cruise, that’s just a Wednesday. 

Final Reckoning, at nearly three hours, does suffer a bit of end-times fatigue – the two-part story Dead Reckoning and this comprise, about a rogue artificial intelligence, is timely, but it’s all tarted up with an absurd amount of MacGuffins and missions that are, well, impossible. Watching parts 7 and 8 over two nights, as I did, exposes you to nearly six hours of Tom Cruise running like mad – it’s like mainlining energy drinks while eating popcorn. Gradually, Cruise has become a messiah figure in the movies, as the challenges get ever more impossible. 

You’d expect part 8 of a series to run low on steam, and the opening act of Final Reckoning is a little sluggish, but when it gets going – especially with two stunning set-pieces involving a submarine and a biplane – all your doubts fly away, and you find yourself asking, “how is he doing that?” I don’t care that in real life Tom Cruise would’ve died like 50 times over by now. I just go for the ride. 

Yeah, yeah I know, while Cruise does a lot of his own stunts there is a certain amount of movie magic and digitally erased safety gear behind it all, but that doesn’t distract from the tactile reality of seeing a man scale the Burj Khalifa towers as he did in 2011’s Ghost Protocol or clutching feverishly onto a spinning biplane in this romp. He was there and not just in some green screen studio laboratory. And the fact that the man is now 62 is astonishing. 

In his dogged quest to be the impossible entertainer and singlehandedly save us all as The Last Movie Star, Cruise has largely abandoned some of the more interesting acting choices he made before he went all-in on the impossible. His turns in movies like Magnolia, Edge of Tomorrow, Interview With A Vampire and Collateral showed a brooding range. I kind of hope he might take some more chances if this, as it probably should be, is the last impossible mission.

These movies aren’t deep, but they’re fine machines of movie magic – mostly devoid of the CGI-slathered blurs that are starting to make superhero and action movies all feel like the same unreal videogame slurry. Mission: Impossible movies are ridiculous, absurd, over the top. And I reckon that both me and Tom Cruise wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Watching Robocop with my Dad

The very first R-rated movie I ever saw in a theatre was Robocop, with my Dad and a buddy. 

It was a pretty full-on choice – Robocop goes hard and never stops, but it’s also one of the most brilliant and satirical action movies of the 1980s. Of course, I didn’t have much cinematic expertise then, at the age of 15 or so. We just saw the poster and TV commercials for this heavy-metal policeman and thought, that looks awesome!

Getting into your first R-rated movie as a teenager was a moment. My pal Nate and I tried, on our own, but were embarrassingly turned down by a snarky cashier only a few years older than us when we tried to see Eddie Murphy’s Coming To America. 

So when it came to Robocop, we somehow talked my Dad into taking us.

Well over 35 years ago now, I can remember cringing a little over the explosion of profanity and violence that pepper Robocop with my Dad sitting next to me. The opening half hour or so, as eager cop Murphy is brutally mown down in torturous detail by cackling psychopaths, is hardcore to watch even today. 

My dad was a good-hearted, church-going and genial guy whose tastes I think ran a little more to Roger Moore James Bond and Tom Clancy books, not splattery sci-fi like Robocop, but he took me anyway. I don’t know quite what he thought as Clarence Boddicker spat invective and people died in inventively bloody ways, but I don’t think he hated it. 

Dad’s been gone nearly a year now, and of course I think about him all the time. 

I re-watched all three Robocop movies recently in a bit of a binge (The very goofy and violent Robocop 2 and the kid-friendly Robocop 3, which I’d actually never even seen, are serious steps down from the flawless polished gleam of the original, of course, but they do have their moments). 

And as memory does, it floats around in your head unasked, and I kept straining to recall that long, long ago afternoon in a movie theatre in ’80s small-town California, watching Robocop with my Dad. It was a very small moment of my time with him over more than 50 years, I know. 

I honestly can’t remember much at all other than how cool Robocop was, but I guess that’s not important. I remember my Dad was there for me, and even if he perhaps quietly thought Robocop was a bit much for his nerdy 15-year-old son, he was pretty cool, too. 

Why I kind of want to live in a western movie town

I’ve been on a Sergio Leone kick lately, watching Clint Eastwood and Henry Fonda stalk impassively through vast open landscapes and ramshackle settlements. Sure, the action is great, the iconic soundtracks slap and even in this highly dubious time in American history, the mythic weight of the western is still strong.

…But half the time I watch westerns, I keep looking at the houses and what it’d be like to live in those sun-bleached outposts, 150 or so years ago now. I study the clattery wooden sidewalks, the creaky balconies dotting the streets (the better for a guy to be shot and fall out of, of course), the home-spun yet vaguely desperate vibe of those infinite saloons poised for violence. 

It’s an odd fixation to have, but as I’ve written before, I grew up in a once-upon-a-time western Gold Rush town, after all, and I think perhaps some part of me is tinged with vague nostalgia for the imagined west I never really saw.

I watch Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef face off in a battle of flinty egos but I also think, gosh, I like the way the grain of the wood sticks out on that old blacksmith in the background, I wonder who’s living behind the faint lights in the windows, I admire the lonely architecture of all those balconies and horse railings, the forlorn ‘Hotel’ sign swinging in the western skies.

Heck, I know half these movies weren’t even made in America or were filmed on studio lots, but it’s the idea that counts.

Of course there’s all the cultural and colonial baggage of America’s settlement to reckon with, and I’d say at least 75 percent of movie westerns are just vaguely one-dimensional frothy cowboys ’n’ indians soap operas. But the ones that aren’t – the Leone, The Searchers or The Wild Bunch or Tombstone or Unforgiven or McCabe and Mrs Miller – they get at the contradictory and violent bloody heart of a nation. The best westerns tell us what America really is, not what it pretends to be. And those long lonesome dirt road main drags lined with hotels and bars and barbers and perhaps a jail or two always evoke a weird yearning in me. 

During my years in America I have been to many famed western towns and they of course are never quite like you’d imagine – there’s no high noon showdowns except for tourists and the quaint shops are all filled with garbage keychains and fart-joke keepsakes now – but if you squint, you can still see a hint of the old dusty ways in places like Tombstone, Arizona, Deadwood, South Dakota or Virginia City, Nevada, I think. You can strain to feel the wind roaring over the plains and deserts and sometimes it feels like a memory. 

You visit an actual abandoned western ghost town like the crepuscular remains of Bodie, California, high up in the mountain plains, and it’s not quite like anything else. 

Bodie, California, sometime in the early 2000s

It’s probably just me, but when I watch those westerns, there’s the story unfolding in front of us, and the second story of the silently evocative imagined past spread out all around the background on every scene.

Would I want to actually live there, 150 years before wi-fi and refrigerators and comfortable tennis shoes? Probably not, but I still fall a little in love with every knot and whorl in those claptrap movie towns, where it’s always high noon somewhere. 

Val Kilmer’s very human Batman

Val Kilmer was a complicated guy, but he left behind a lot of indelible movie performances. Nobody would ever call Batman Forever a good movie, really, but despite all the missteps and terribly 1990s trappings of it all, there are moments when I do think Kilmer’s Batman is one of my favourite takes on the caped crusader.

Kilmer, I think, was the funniest Batman other than ’60s icon Adam West. That’s not exactly something that fans of none-more-dark Dark Knight takes might appreciate.

As a Bat-fan, I’ve always liked the Batman who was a little more human, the one we’d see running around in Brave and Bold comics in the 1970s tossing quips about with Green Arrow and Kamandi. A Batman who is so utterly bleak gets a bit old. 

Director Joel Schumacher took all the gothic weirdness and carnival humour of Tim Burton’s first two Bat-movies and exploded it into full-on camp and neon garishness. Batman Forever, turning 30 in 2025, was a huge hit, lest we forget, the #1 movie of the year. But it all came crashing down with 1997’s flop Batman and Robin, this time starring a far too-glib George Clooney as Bats and ramping up the colourful kitsch about 500% more. Few people look back at Schumacher’s Batman as a peak for the character now. 

And Batman Forever is a mess, don’t get me wrong. It might just boast the two most annoying comic book movie villains of all time in Jim Carrey’s insufferably twitchy Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones’ frantic and undignified Two-Face, who spends most of the movie cackling, grunting and wahoo-ing. The movie shoehorns in an origin for Chris O’Donnell‘s totally ’90s Robin, an incredibly sexed-up Nicole Kidman as a love interest and a kind of incoherent plot about brain-stealing technology.  Whenever I watch it I have to fight the urge to slap Carrey so I can focus on the bits that do work. 

It starts off clearly stating it isn’t going to be Keaton/Burton’s Batman, with fetishistic shots of Kilmer donning the Bat-gear and the first lines of dialogue being a lame joke about Batman getting drive-through for dinner. (Cue that McDonald’s ad, of course.) 

And yet, I like Kilmer as a blonde Bruce Wayne/Batman. There is a sly wit to Kilmer’s performance, which gives us a Batman with a sense of humour without being quite as lightweight as Clooney ended up. Little tics linger like his Bruce Wayne constantly fooling about with glasses (does Batman wear contacts?). His Batman smiles broadly in one memorable scene, which could be cheesy but Kilmer makes it a little, well, charming and sincere. Why can’t Batman smile, occasionally? It ain’t always dark.

His Bruce Wayne is courageous and not just a playboy – brawling with villains without a costume in several scenes, focused with a whiff of arrogance, and smart but also a little scared. 

Michael Keaton was a tense and wiry surprise as Batman (it’s easy now to forget his casting was hated by pre-internet fandom once upon a time) and Bale, Pattinson and Affleck have all given us variations on a very serious, stern Bruce Wayne/Batman. But I still think Kilmer’s Batman is the only one who seems kind of like a Batman you’d want to hang out with, really. 

Kilmer navigates Batman’s dual nature fairly well in Batman Forever – haunted by his past, but wanting to have a life of his own outside Batman. The rickety script doesn’t really serve him well – at one point Batman quits, only to unquit about 30 seconds later – but Kilmer sells story beats like his mentorship of the angry young Robin and his attraction to Kidman’s ridiculously horny psychologist character.

He cracks a few jokes, but he never makes Batman the joke. Kilmer’s movies like Tombstone and Top Secret and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang were great, but his underrated Batman manages the trick of making a mediocre movie almost worth liking. 

My favourite Roger Corman – X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes

“Soon, I’ll be able to see what no man has ever seen.” – Dr James Xavier 

When the great movie producer and director Roger Corman died last year at 98, he left one hell of a legacy for film lovers, schlock fans, drive-in movie buffs and anyone who enjoyed the dirt-cheap, hugely entertaining corn he specialised in.

Everyone has their favourite Corman – my first was the Star Wars/Seven Samurai ripoff Battle Beyond The Stars, which was repeated endlessly on cable TV when I was a kid. There’s the colourfully gory adaptations of Poe tales starring Vincent Price. His producing the first films by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. The sexy trashy Big Bad Mama starring Angie Dickinson. The Ramones trashing the joint in Rock ’n’ Roll High School. Peter Bogdanovich’s startlingly still relevant Targets with Boris Karloff. The utterly insane Judge Dredd meets Mad Max dystopia of Death Race 2000. So much more, much of it sexploitation and exploitation and just general titillation.

But my favourite film Corman directed has always been the more restrained and oddly haunting X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes from 1963, starring one-time Oscar winner Ray Milland as a scientist determined to break through the barriers of dull ordinary human vision and see… well, everything. 

It’s got a big fan in none other than Stephen King, who wrote about it in his book Danse Macabre as “one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made.”

X is typical Corman with a low budget and ultra-basic stripped-down production values, but there’s something about it that grabs me. It’s got your typical scientist who is determined to explore the unknown whatever the cost, with Milland as Dr James Xavier, whose research into unknown spectrums of vision (“I’m blind to all but a tenth of the universe!”) has him experimenting on himself with dangerous eye drops.

At first, Xavier gets X-ray vision just like in the comics (yep, there’s a goofily fun nude scene, one of the movie’s few lighter moments), but then things get … darker. It involves accidental murder, a sequence as a carny attraction (featuring a rare early serious supporting role by Don Rickles, of all people) and Xavier’s vision gradually changing, with sunglasses and freaky contact lenses giving us a hint of what must be going on behind those eyelids. 

The “special effects” that allow us to see the world through Xavier’s eyes are mostly dime-store gimmicks and blurry psychedelic colours, and yet, their vagueness allows us to imagine what Xavier is actually seeing out there. 

Milland, always a sturdy authoritative presence in movies, gives X a helping of emotional depth as the movie explores questions of morality, religion and hope in its brisk 79 minutes. While Corman’s movies are often a lot of fun, this is the one that always leaves me thinking a bit. What would it be like to see truly everything out there? How much of the world do we miss on a daily basis? And is there some things man is not meant to see? 

Spoiler alert: X ends on a famously bleak note with Xavier, unable to control his increasingly chaotic visions, tearing out his own eyeballs in a shock-cut freeze frame. The story jerks to a halt, the screen frozen in a moment of utter infinite horror. 

King in Danse Macabre went on to claim there was a great lost coda to that scene: “I have heard rumours – they may or may not be true – that the final line of dialogue from the film was cut as too horrifying. …. According to the rumour, Milland screams: I can still see!” 

Now that’s terrifying. Although, nobody has ever really confirmed it existed. Corman himself on the DVD commentary thinks he might have shot that ending, but then again he might not. It’s a cool idea, but even without that lost final twist of the knife, X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes is worth seeing. There’s been talk over the 60 years or so since it came out of a remake, but the creepy and sparse tone of the original is hard to imagine beating. Even the cheapness of the special effects adds something to it all. 

It’s that whiff of cosmic, unknowable horror that makes X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes linger in my mind, I guess. There is no true villain here and there is no hero. Only a strangely pitiable mad scientist, determined to broaden his horizons until he realises much too late there is no end to these horizons. 

“I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness… a light that glows, changes… and in the center of the universe… the eye that sees us all.” – Dr James Xavier 

Ten great underrated Gene Hackman movies 

If I had a nickel for every time I saw Gene Hackman called an “everyman” in the past week or so, I’d be rich. But Hackman – easily one of my top half-dozen or so favourite actors – was no everyman, really. He was less instantly dazzling than a golden god like Robert Redford or Warren Beatty perhaps, but he was magnetic nevertheless. He packed a quiet authority into every performance while keeping his characters relatable and real. He could play thieves, cops, cowboys and con men, and the only thing ‘everyman’ to me about his acting was his sheer versatility. 

It’s sad that the dramatic circumstances of his and his wife’s deaths kicked off the kind of tabloid frenzy that you know Hackman would’ve hated. Gene Hackman is gone at 95. It’s the work that remains, and endures. 

Obituaries were quick to mention all the unmistakable masterpieces he was involved with – The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde, The Conversation, Unforgiven, The Royal Tenenbaums. But Hackman’s long career is full of gems.

He was the kind of actor who kicked even the most mediocre of movies up a notch through his presence. Since the news of his death broke, rather than wallowing in morbid details of his death, I’ve been celebrating Hackman’s life on screen. Here’s 10 of my favourite somewhat underrated Gene Hackman films well worth seeking out: 

I Never Sang For My Father (1970) – Hackman received an Oscar nomination for this melodrama about a troubled son trying to connect to his difficult father, and it’s one of his finest roles, but nearly forgotten today (I blame the kind of terrible title). This one digs into complicated relationships with aging parents with a kind of brutal honesty that’s still pretty stunning today. Playing a repressed and conflicted ordinary joe, Hackman shows how much he can do with just his eyes and furrowed brow. 

Prime Cut (1972) – This bitterly black and mean piece of farm noir stars Lee Marvin as a grim mob fixer and Hackman as a sleazy Kansas cattle rancher who also dabbles in sex slavery and gruesome murders. Despite his kind of limited screen time, Hackman’s grinningly amoral slimeball is a nasty delight – “Cow flesh, girl flesh … all the same to me.” 

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) – Titanic without all the sappy romance nonsense, this rip-roaring disaster epic was a huge hit back in the day, and a big part of that is thanks to Hackman in a firm leading man action hero role – as an iconoclastic free-thinking priest, of all things. It doesn’t get mentioned in the same league as grittier stuff like The French Connection, but it’s anchored by Hickman’s charisma and prickly guts. Big and bold fun, it’s corny and yet riveting 50-plus years later, and it’s impossible not to cheer for Hackman as he single-handedly tries to save the survivors on a quickly sinking cruise ship. 

Scarecrow (1973) – The only movie that paired acting legends Al Pacino and Hackman, as two wandering vagabonds making their way from California to the East Coast. Hackman’s gruff and sullen character pairs well with Pacino’s fidgety, chatty loser, as what starts off as an odd couple buddy comedy turns into a heartbreaking little gem about failure and optimism. 

The French Connection II (1975) – Somewhat overshadowed by its Oscar-winning predecessor, this sequel takes Hackman’s brute cop Popeye Doyle down into the abyss. It picks right up from the first movie with an obsessed Doyle travelling to France to track down the drug dealer who got away. Cannily undermining sequel expectations, it features a long, riveting sequence where Doyle is captured and addicted to heroin. Like the first, it’s a kind of anti-cop story that lingers in the brain. 

Night Moves (1975) – I love me some “sweaty noir,” and this steamy Florida mystery delivers sex, death and malice in equal measures. Hackman is a hapless private detective who gets wrapped up in a missing persons case that slowly submerges his entire life. A movie that’s soaked with a sense of anxiety and despair all the way through, somewhat forgotten but now getting its due. 

Superman II (1980) – I’m pretty sure the first time I ever saw Gene Hackman on screen was his oily, confident turn as Lex Luthor. He’s great in the first movie, too, but for me, Superman II will always be my favourite, as Luthor sidles on in about halfway through and tries to play both sides in Superman’s battle against Zod. The scene where Luthor swaggers on into the Daily Planet and attempts to charm three insanely powerful alien psychopaths through sheer force of will is peak Hackman to me. “Kill me? Lex Luthor? Extinguish the greatest criminal flame of our age?” It’s easy to dismiss his Luthor as a work-for-hire gig (especially when you look at the woeful Superman IV) but there’s frequently a sparkle in Hackman’s eye that shows how much fun he was having. 

BAT-21 (1988): Hackman, a former Marine himself, played lots of military men. He shines here as a cerebral Air Force navigator shot down in Vietnam and trying to stay alive. This one got kind of lost in the flood of Vietnam movies of the late ’80s like Platoon, but is worth revisiting. His hero is no Rambo – he’s a desk jockey trying to stay alive who’s never actually experienced war up close – and Hackman’s thoughtful, restrained performance gives it more depth than your usual gung-ho war picture. 

The Quick And The Dead (1995): Sam Raimi’s delightfully campy western boasts a murderer’s row of talent – Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Sharon Stone – but Hackman’s smiling psychopath John Herod is a scenery-chewing delight, a brasher and wilder take on his Oscar-winning Unforgiven killer. 

Heist (2001): Hackman was surely made to rattle off David Mamet’s whip-smart dialogue, and in one of his last films before retiring, he’s perfect as an ageing thief looking to make one last score. While its tangled heist plot is an echo of many other movies, it’s just a pleasure to watch Hackman and a motley crew of great actors doing crimes and cracking wise. 

Thanks for the movies, Gene. You were no everyman to me.

Hello, I wrote a book, and it’s only taken me 30 years

Greetings! I wrote a book. Well, I’ve actually been writing it for about 30 years, believe it or not. Introducing Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024, a hefty compendium of my columns, essays, feature profiles and much more over the course of my so-called career!

I’ve written an awful lot of words over the years, but I wanted to put together something that was a little more permanent than a bunch of yellowing newspapers and broken website links. Clippings is, much like many journalism careers, an eclectic mix, from long features to blog posts to deeply personal essays to in-depth pop culture criticism, spanning from Mississippi to California to New York City to New Zealand. 

From interviewing governors and rock stars to climbing active volcanos and adjusting to life on the other side of the world, this book is me saying, “Hey, I was here, and this is some of what I did along the way.” Doesn’t everyone want to say that at some point about their life’s work, whatever it is? Throw it all together, and it’s probably as close to a sort of autobiography as I’ll ever get.

It’s got many of my works from long-ago newspapers and magazines, websites and even some fine pieces from this very website in a handsome curated form sure to be adored by your family for generations.

I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

Get it here: Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 by Nik Dirga 

So, I’ve been reading a lot of Captain America comics lately

When I was a kid I always thought Captain America was a bit dorky. Batman and Spider-Man and Wolverine were hip, man. 

It took me a long while to discover the uncomplicated charms of Cap. He’s a good man in a world full of troubles, which for some peculiar reason I can’t quite put my finger on, seems really appropriate as a role model in this battered year of 2025. 

Captain America has been slinging his shield since 1939 in comics, and was probably punching Nazis before your grandparents were even born. Brought back in the 1960s as a keystone for the Avengers, he’s been the moral centre of the Marvel comics universe for decades. 

Yet I really didn’t read an awful lot of Captain America solo comics until the last few years – I never disliked the character, who soared in a lot of great Avengers comics, but he just seemed rather, well, white bread. 

But as usual, I was wrong, and slowly working my way through lots of great Cap stories from the 1960s to 2020s has shown me that you can still make a patriotic American superhero interesting. Like any character, there’s ups and downs to be had, but creators like Lee and Kirby, Steve Englehart, Ed Brubaker, the late Mark Gruenwald and Roger Stern have all done terrific stories over the years. 

The challenge for writers has been in making Cap a believer in a higher cause without being a mindless follower to it. An element of doubt is key to making Captain America great. 

Evil Captain America has been done far too many times and isn’t that interesting, but Doubtful Captain America is a constant of the character, a man who believes in his country but is fairly often willing to question it, up to engaging in a civil war over his beliefs or even quitting the job several times.

As an example of bad Captain America, Mark Millar’s post-9/11 edgelord Captain America in The Ultimates hasn’t aged well at all, channeling Bush-era belligerence and arrogance into a character who’s the opposite of what Cap should be. And being good isn’t being weak.

There’s a fine line between making Cap frequently question his patriotism and making him a whining bore, of course. Yet I admire the writers who’ve made us realise that uncertainty and kindness isn’t a bad thing, all while telling us stories of a man dressed up in red, white and blue.

There’s nothing worse than a fanatic who thinks he can do no wrong. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

The marvellous performance by Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in the MCU helped seal my Cap fondness, making square-jawed decency seem kinda hot. And of course, there can be more than one Captain America – Anthony Mackie is stepping up as the main man’s successor in a new movie being released this week. Whether or not the movie itself is great, Mackie has done a fine job in his MCU appearances tapping into that fundamental charm and battered optimism Cap needs. 

I imagine if Cap was real these days he’d be aghast at a lot of what’s going on under the colours of his flag, but then again he’d probably find it pretty familiar. He punched Hitler, after all. 

Again, maybe it’s the tenor of the times. There ain’t a lot of heroes in the real world at the moment. I’ll just keep reading my Captain America comics and hoping for better days ahead. 

Bob Dylan is a complete unknown, and that’s the point

One of the secrets of Bob Dylan’s success is his enduring mystery. Dylan has forged a 60-year career out of being opaque, inscrutable…. a “complete unknown,” if you will.

I’ll admit, I’m kind of a sucker for rock star musical biopics, even when they’re terrible. I watched Elvis and Walk The Line and Bohemian Rhapsody and I embrace the cheesy “rags to riches to overdose” narrative of such films, even when my head admits they’re not always great movies.

A Complete Unknown is a deep dive into Bob Dylan’s early years that does its share of romanticising and mythologising… but then again, hasn’t Dylan himself been doing that since he was a kid? For me, it hit the spot by embracing the many mysteries of Bob, revelling in music biopic cliches while being just prickly enough to feel real.

Timothée Chalamet is really far too pretty to be young Bob, who had a reedy, squinty babyface, but he nicely summons up the keen intelligence, peculiar charisma and somewhat mercenary ethics of young Bobby. Dylan rode into New York from rural Minnesota pretending to be everything from a hobo to a carnival worker. He threw aside his birth name of Zimmerman and became a kind of perpetual musical sponge, absorbing everything and synthesising it into something kind of new. 

A Complete Unknown is about the birth of an artist who’s also a magpie, a wry cynic and also kind of a genius who’s not really a very nice guy. Dylan is called an “asshole” a couple of times in the film, which thankfully doesn’t try to show him as some kind of saintly hero. We avoid some big teary monologue where Bob Dylan reveals all the dark secrets that motivate him.

This exchange is as close as A Complete Unknown gets to peeking behind the mask: “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.“

Chalamet’s natural teen idol charm is cleverly subverted just enough to make his Dylan feel like an echo of the thin wild mercury sound of the man himself. (And while he doesn’t sound exactly like Dylan singing, he sounds close enough to make it work, and lipsynching Dylan would’ve been even weirder.)

A Complete Unknown takes the great Bob Dylan creation myth and hits all the beats – his turn from folk music to electric, his wry confidence, his thorny romance with Joan Baez, his worship of Woody Guthrie. The movie follows Dylan from his arrival in New York as an eager kid up through his explosion into stardom in the mid ‘60s, and its big emotional turn is in Dylan’s moving from stark and preachy folk into raw and raucous rock, culminating in his famously defiant “electric” performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

A Complete Unknown wrings Dylan’s transformation for a lot of drama that might seem a bit hokey from 2025 eyes – so he’s playing an electric guitar now, so what? – but it’s worth remembering that Dylan’s “betrayal” of folk was a big deal back in the day. (Ed Norton‘s marvellous supporting turn as folkie Pete Seeger really captures the man’s uniquely kind heart and endearing dorkiness.)

As anyone who’s dipped their toes into the vast waters of Dylanology knows, there’s an infinite number of Bobs in the Dylanverse. (At least 80, as I painstakingly rambled on about a few years ago!) There’s no way A Complete Unknown, which follows a fairly basic biopic blueprint, could satisfy everyone, and we’ve certainly got cinema bizarro like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There or Bob-starring oddities like Masked And Anonymous to fill any taste. 

Watching Martin Scorcese’s superb documentary No Direction Home again recently, which follows Dylan’s 1966 tour of Britain in some dazzlingly vibrant footage, I was struck by how angry many of the British fans interviewed at the time were with Dylan’s new style. “I think he’s prostituting himself,” one barks. Yet to my eyes now, the hyper electric Dylan of 1966 is quite possibly his finest era. God only knows what would’ve happened if social media existed at the time.

Unknown works for me because it never quite pretends to be definitive, and knows there’s many more alternate Bob stories to be told. But hey, it’s turning new audiences on to Dylan music, got a bunch of Oscar nods, and is a reminder that after nearly 84 years walking this Earth, there’s still nobody quite like him. 

Is it 100% true? It’s pretty and darned entertaining, but perhaps its biggest success is in carefully keeping Bob Dylan’s true motivations a complete unknown. 

Who is the greatest actor of our time and why is it Willem Dafoe?

Honestly, in my mind, a good character actor beats the heck out of a box office superstar every day. Rising stars like Timothée Chalamet or Glen Powell, sure, they do fine stuff, but give me a good turn by a supporting scene-stealer like John Turturro, Michael Stuhlbarg, Stephen McKinley Henderson, the late great Lance Reddick, Walter Goggins or the inevitable Stephen Root, and I’m in heaven. 

And the king of the character actors these days has to be Willem Dafoe, surely the only man who can claim to have played Jesus Christ, the vampire Nosferatu and the Green Goblin. 

Dafoe is a character actor who’s worked his way up to the A-list. Anytime Dafoe is on screen, his wired presence takes over – in the space of a few days, I watched him as a hilarious bad actor-turned-ghost cop in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and then as a dogged eccentric vampire slayer in the superb new Nosferatu by Robert Eggers. (Because he’s Willem Dafoe, he of course also played that titular vampire himself in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, and got an Oscar nomination for it!)

As he ages, Dafoe has honed his intense charm to a fine tone, able to play creeps and heroes equally well. He turns 70 this year but seems as full of curiosity and a willingness to experiment as a teenager.

He’s been doing this for more than 40 years now and while, regrettably, he’s never won an Oscar, he’s been a key player in acclaimed movies like Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July and The English Patient. He’s worked with the finest directors of our time like Wes Anderson, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos.

There is always a hint of tensely restrained violence to Dafoe, which contrasts with his generally genial offscreen character.

When he’s bad, he’s unforgettable. His lounge lizard killer (and hideous rotting teeth) in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart still haunts me, as do his blunt brutal hitman in The Grand Budapest Hotel or his layered Norman Osborn in the 2002 Spider-Man movie, which was so good he was brought back to reprise the role nearly 20 years later in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

But it’s the tenderness he can also summon up that hits the hardest, whether his remarkable Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s underrated Last Temptation of Christ, the mutilated Dr Frankenstein avatar in Poor Things, Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate or his Oscar-nominated turn in the heartbreaking The Florida Project. 

A lot of actors have a type, which they cash in on and play until the money stops rolling in (Chris Pratt, I’m looking at you). But Dafoe seems happy to try to be anybody, like a good character actor should. 

Dafoe’s not afraid to go hard in all-out weird cinema like The Lighthouse or Antichrist, then turn around and appear in the latest MCU blockbuster too. 

An incredibly prolific actor, he’s not always utilised to his full potential – I’m still struggling to figure out why the heck he was in Aquaman, really – but he pretty much always makes the movies he’s in a better place.

Stars come and go, but character actors – man, they just burn hard the whole way through.