Archive
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – Danny Elfman
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When the big-screen reboot of Mission: Impossible was greenlit in 1992, almost thirty years had passed since the original TV series starring Peter Graves premiered on CBS. It was produced by Tom Cruise’s new production company to be a vehicle for the box-office star; he was a fan of the original show and wanted to showcase himself in the spy genre, as well as give himself the opportunity to engage in some extravagant stunt work. Development began with filmmaker Sydney Pollack, but Cruise eventually turned to Brian De Palma to direct it, with a screenplay by David Koepp, Robert Towne, and Steven Zaillian. Read more…
Lalo Schifrin, 1932-2025
Composer, pianist and conductor Lalo Schifrin died at his home in Los Angeles on June 26, 2025, at the age of 93, from complications of pneumonia.
One of the most versatile and distinctive film composers of the twentieth century, Schifrin wrote music for more than 100 films and television productions, received six Academy Award nominations and won four Grammy Awards. His scores encompassed jazz, funk, Latin music, avant-garde experimentation and large-scale symphonic writing, but his most famous composition remains the instantly recognizable theme for Mission: Impossible.
Boris Claudio Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 21, 1932. His father Luis was concertmaster at the Teatro Colón, and Schifrin began studying piano at five. After early training in Argentina he received a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire, where his studies included work with Olivier Messiaen and Charles Koechlin. At the same time he immersed himself in jazz, performing in Paris clubs and developing the combination of classical technique and rhythmic freedom that would become central to his musical personality.
Returning to Argentina in 1956, Schifrin formed a jazz orchestra and came to the attention of Dizzy Gillespie, who encouraged him to move to the United States. Schifrin subsequently became pianist and arranger for Gillespie and composed the acclaimed Gillespiana, beginning an enduring career in jazz alongside his work for the screen. He also arranged and recorded with musicians including Count Basie, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.
Schifrin moved to Los Angeles in 1963 and quickly became established in film and television. Early feature assignments included Rhino! (1964) and The Cincinnati Kid (1965), while television brought him work on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and, in 1966, the assignment that changed his career. For Mission: Impossible he wrote a propulsive main theme in unusual 5/4 time, combining insistent percussion, brass and flute into one of the most instantly identifiable television themes ever composed. It won Grammys for Best Instrumental Theme and Best Original Score for a Motion Picture or Television Show and later became an essential part of the Tom Cruise film series. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING – Max Aruj, Alfie Godfrey
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s hard to believe that Tom Cruise has been making Mission: Impossible movies for almost 30 years. He was 34 when he first took on the role of IMF agent Ethan Hunt in the first franchise installment back in 1996, and here he is again, now aged 62, still fighting bad guys, hanging out of planes, and sprinting for all he’s worth. If the press reports are to be believed, The Final Reckoning will be the eighth and final Mission: Impossible movie, and Cruise and the gang clearly wanted to go out with a bang – almost literally. It continues the plot of the last film, Dead Reckoning, and again sees Ethan and his IMF colleagues battling with his nemesis Gabriel for control of an artificial intelligence system nicknamed ‘The Entity,’ which was designed to sabotage digital systems, but has since achieved sentience and ‘gone rogue’ with the capability to infiltrate all of the world’s major defense, military, and intelligence networks. It is the fourth M:I film written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, and co-stars Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, and Pom Klementieff, with Henry Czerny and Angela Bassett in major supporting roles. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING – Lorne Balfe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There aren’t many bonafide movie stars these days; actors or actresses who can will a film into production, attract top notch support, and get audiences flowing into cinemas, purely on the strength of their charisma and appeal. Tom Cruise is one of the few who can still do that in Hollywood, and his latest film – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One – is an action blockbuster tailored to his unique blend of movie-making. Cruise returns for the seventh time as IMF Special Agent Ethan Hunt, the all-action leader of a team of spies saving the world from clandestine threats and evil super-villains. In this latest film, the threat is a piece of rogue artificial intelligence nicknamed ‘The Entity,’ which was designed to sabotage digital systems, but has since achieved sentience and ‘gone rogue’ with the capability to infiltrate all of the world’s major defense, military, and intelligence networks. Control of the Entity is obtained by way of a specific type of key, which various powers attempt to obtain, while Hunt and his team try to stop the key from falling into the wrong hands – one of whom is a shadowy figure from Hunt’s own past. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT – Lorne Balfe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When actor/producer Tom Cruise got together with director Brian De Palma in 1996 to make a brand new big-screen version of the classic 1960s spy TV series Mission: Impossible, I doubt that even he expected that he would still be playing the role of action hero Ethan Hunt 22 years later – yet, here we are. We’ve gone through multiple director changes in the intervening two decades – John Woo, J. J. Abrams, Brad Bird – but for the time being the series appears to have settled on Christopher McQuarrie, who with this film becomes the first director to make two Mission: Impossible films. Fallout is, in many ways, a continuation of the story established during Rogue Nation in 2015, as it sees Hunt and his IMF compatriots again locking horns with the shadowy villain Solomon Lane, whose sinister Syndicate organization continues to be a threat to the stability of the world. The globetrotting adventure sees the action moving from Berlin to Paris to London to the foothills of the Himalayas – and what action it is! The staggering set-pieces in the film include a HALO jump over Paris which Cruise did for real, a brutal three-way fight sequence in a bathroom, a high-speed motorbike chase around the Arc de Triomphe and beyond, an epic foot chase through the streets of Britain’s capital that contains a scene where Cruise smashed his ankle – for real – jumping from one building to another, and an exhilarating helicopter dogfight weaving between the towering peaks of the Kashmir. The film co-stars Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, and Alec Baldwin, and has been widely acclaimed as one of the best action movies in recent years. Read more…
BULLITT – Lalo Schifrin
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Steve McQueen was seeking a script for his next film and took a liking to author Robert Fish’s novel Mute Witness (1963). His production company Solar Productions purchased the film rights, and brought in Alan Trustman and Henry Kleiner to write the screenplay. He made a surprising choice to bring in English director Peter Yates after viewing the stunning extended car chase scene in his last movie, Robbery (1967). McQueen chose to change the film’s title to “Bullitt”, which based his character Frank Bullitt on real life San Francisco Inspector Dave Toschi, with who he studied as part of his training and orientation to police procedures and practices. McQueen would play the titular role, which would be a departure for him in that for the first time he would abandon his ‘rebel’ persona and join the Establishment as a police officer. To round out the cast, McQueen brought in Robert Vaughn as Walter Chalmers and Jacqueline Bisset as Cathy. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION – Joe Kraemer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I have, in my head, a list of composers whose level of talent is directly inverse to the number and quality of films they are asked to score. Some of them are composers who used to get major assignments but have fallen off the radar of late: people like Bruce Broughton, Cliff Eidelman, Trevor Jones, and David Newman. Others are composers who, for whatever reason, have yet to make that major breakthrough despite having talent in abundance: people like Neal Acree, Scott Glasgow, Federico Jusid, Nuno Malo, and too many others to list here. For the longest time Joe Kraemer was on that list too, but with the release of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, I might finally be able to cross him off. The film is the latest action extravaganza starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, and others, as agents with the top-secret IMF espionage and counter-terrorism force, seeking to take down ‘the Syndicate’, a network of highly skilled operatives who are dedicated to establishing a new world order via an escalating series of terrorist attacks and disasters. The movie globe-trots from Belarus to Cuba, to Vienna, to Morocco, and finally the UK, with the usual array of breathtaking stunts; it is directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects. Read more…
RUSH HOUR 3 – Lalo Schifrin
Original Review by Clark Douglas
Perhaps the least necessary sequel of the summer, “Rush Hour 3” still managed to scrape up a decent amount of money, proving… um… some terribly depressing point, I would imagine. The film stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as a couple of cops who have to find terribly contrived and exotic ways to solve various crimes. The talented supporting cast includes Philip Baker Hall, Max Von Sydow, and Roman Polanski, and not one of them has a single interesting thing to do. It’s a pretty mediocre movie, and as with the previous two “Rush Hour” efforts, the highlights are Jackie Chan’s stunts (much more limited in this installment) and Lalo Schifrin’s score. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III – Michael Giacchino
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s not so long ago that JJ Abrams was just another budding writer/director in Hollywood, and Michael Giacchino was a promising young composer writing music for video games. However, following the huge success of Abrams’ TV shows Alias and Lost, and Giacchino’s work on the box-office blockbuster The Incredibles, the pair of them are now cinematic hot properties, working together on one of summer 2006’s most-eagerly awaited and high-profile action movies: Mission Impossible III. The third film based on the classic 1960s spy thriller show, Mission: Impossible III once again stars Tom Cruise as special agent Ethan Hunt, trotting around the globe to all manner of exotic locations, on a secret mission to thwart the nefarious plans of the film’s arch-villain, Owen Davian, played by recent Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman. Along for the ride is a big name supporting cast which includes Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, Billy Crudup and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and by all accounts the film is a spectacular, gadget-filled, explosion-laden thrill ride which pushes all the right blockbuster buttons. Read more…
ABOMINABLE – Lalo Schifrin
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Abominable may have the unique honour of being the first ever film where an established Hollywood composer scored the feature directorial debut of their offspring. Certainly no other filmmaking-children-of-composers spring to mind. The director in question is Ryan Schifrin, the 33 year-old son of Lalo Schifrin, and the film in question is Abominable, a horror-thriller set in the Pacific North-West, where action man Preston Rogers (Matt McCoy) is recovering in an isolated cabin after a climbing accident. His recuperation is put on hold, however, when he sees the legendary Bigfoot – and realises that the supposedly-friendly Sasquatch is in reality a vicious man-eating beast! The only problem is that, after years of hoax sightings, no-one believes Preston’s tale, and it falls on his shoulders to warn everyone before the beast goes on a bloody rampage. The film also stars Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Dee Wallace Stone (from ET), the late Paul Gleason, and newcomer Haley Joel, and will be released straight-to-DVD in October 2006. Read more…
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Hans Zimmer’s score has come in for a lot of criticism over the last few weeks but, when you consider the film which his score accompanies, it’s a wonder it turned out this good. After everyone complained about how confusing Mission: Impossible was, it was decided to make Mission: Impossible 2 simpler. Simpler, yes. Dumber, no, but once again the Hollywood executives have pandered to the lowest common denominator of the movie-going public, and made M:I2 a stupid, albeit enjoyable movie, at least on a visceral level. After being forced to watch producer/star Tom Cruise show off his glistening biceps while hanging off a mountain during the opening credits, Mission: Impossible 2 actually turns out to be a virus movie with delusions of grandeur. Rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) has stolen the antidote to a killer virus called chimera which, when released into the atmosphere, will incapacitate anyone who encounters it within 20 hours. With the help of his nasty Australian henchman Stamp (Richard Roxburgh), Ambrose plans to steal the virus itself from the laboratory where it was made, release it, and blackmail the world into paying him for the cure. The mission, should the ubiquitous Ethan Hunt (Cruise) choose to accept it, is to travel to Australia in the company of his loyal technical whiz Luther (Ving Rhames), and thwart Ambrose’s plan – but not before he has made a diversion to Spain to elicit the help of Nyah Nordoff-Hall (the luminous Thandie Newton), Ambrose’s former lover. Read more…
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