Last summer, Tom Cruise was given credit for saving the theatrical experience with the widely beloved “Top Gun: Maverick.” One of our last true movie stars returns over a year later as the blockbuster experience seems to be fading with high-budget Hollywood endeavors like "The Flash" and "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" falling short of expectations. Can he be Hollywood's savior again? I hope so because “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is a ridiculously good time. Once again, director Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise, and their team have crafted a deceptively simple thriller, a film that bounces good, bad, and in-between characters off each other for 163 minutes (an admittedly audacious runtime for a film with “Part One” in the title that somehow doesn’t feel long). Some of the overcooked dialogue about the importance of this particular mission gets repetitive, but then McQuarrie and his team will reveal some stunningly conceived action sequence that makes all the spy-speak tolerable. Hollywood is currently questioning the very state of their industry. Leave it to Ethan Hunt to accept the mission.

While this series essentially rebooted in its fourth chapter, changing tone and style significantly, this seventh film very cleverly ties back to the 1996 Brian De Palma original more than any other, almost as if it's uniting the two halves of the franchise. It’s not an origin story, but it does have the tenor of something like the excellent “Casino Royale” in how it unpacks the very purpose of a beloved character. “Dead Reckoning Part One” is about Ethan Hunt reconciling how he got to this point in his life, and McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen narratively recall De Palma’s film repeatedly. And with its sweaty, canted close-ups, Fraser Taggart’s cinematography wants you to remember the first movie—how Ethan Hunt became an agent and the price he’s been paying from the beginning.

Dead Reckoning Part One is another swaggering delight in the series, with director Christopher McQuarrie yet again finding some actual narrative grist in the continued adventures of the world’s silliest superspy. In having Ethan do battle with a ruthless AI dubbed “the Entity,” which wants to control the world’s governments, the film holds him up as an exemplar of humanity—a bold gambit, perhaps, given that Cruise is one of our strangest celebrities, but one the Mission: Impossible movies have been nudging forward for quite a while now. Someone like James Bond might be the best at what he does, but he’s still an extension of the state, and ultimately a ruthless person as a result. Hunt is technically part of America’s intelligence apparatus, but he rejects any notion of “the greater good,” instead stretching reality however he can to save everyone around him and the world at the same time.

Surrounding Ethan is his usual gaggle of pals: the tech guys Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and the multitalented British spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). The big additions to the mix are two more femmes fatales, an expert pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell) and an assassin named Paris (Pom Klementieff). And though our villain is nothing more than a glowing sphere that lives in the cloud, it does have a human emissary of sorts, the seething terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales, sporting a perfectly cropped salt-and-pepper beard). All of them are hunting for a set of special keys that will do … something to the Entity; as is usual for Mission: Impossible, the details are pretty unimportant.

Still, fans of McQuarrie’s high-energy approach in the series’ prior two films might be surprised at the extent to which this entry remembers the other side of spycraft. There’s a lot of double-crossing and murky alliance-making, evoking the twisty espionage of Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible, way back in 1996; to underline it, the nervy character actor Henry Czerny returns as Eugene Kittridge, now the CIA chief, who hasn’t appeared since that 1996 installment. He’s there largely to highlight the ongoing absurdity of Hunt’s “Impossible Mission Force,” the quasi-governmental agency that somehow exists alongside America’s regular intelligence apparatus and recruits agents who are better at close-up magic than they are at hand-to-hand combat.

Though the computerized Entity is the main villain, Kittridge represents an element that’s just as important in these movies: the stuffed shirt who sputters impotently as Ethan and his friends defy all logic on their way to saving the day. Dead Reckoning Part One still has plenty of wild stunts—like Ethan riding a motorcycle off a mountain, and doing martial arts atop the Orient Express—but there’s more than a hint of melancholy in between all the action, and a hint of worry that maybe the good times can’t last forever in the face of all this bureaucratic, algorithmic thought. Given that this is a Part One, the film’s conclusion is inevitably less satisfying than a proper third act, but this is a worthy entry in America’s best ongoing franchise, one where sincerity and absurdity walk hand in hand with vital, triumphant conviction.

The movie’s sustained adrenaline charge is both its strength and its shortcoming. Comparing part one of Dead Reckoning with Brian De Palma’s terrific 1996 opener, which upgraded the CIA’s covert Impossible Missions Force from its 1960s television origins to the big screen, is an illuminating insight into how audience expectations have changed in the past 27 years — or perhaps more accurately, how the major studios have reshaped audience expectations.

Working with screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne, De Palma assembled the nuts and bolts of an admittedly convoluted story with patience and care. He allowed his characters space to breathe while building to stylishly choreographed action sequences that bristled with the director’s customary Hitchcockian flair.

Notable among them was a nail-biting CIA heist operation in which Cruise’s Hunt was lowered into a state-of-the-art Langley security vault to copy a highly prized classified document. It set the tone for a series driven by jaw-dropping stunts, redefining the actor’s career at the same time.

In the almost three decades since that film, Cruise has become a much better actor. It’s hard to take the younger Ethan seriously now when he’s grinning like a cocky schoolboy in exchanges with Vanessa Redgrave’s smooth-as-silk arms dealer, Max — like some high school jock trying to impress the head cheerleader.

His Ethan has become more careworn, jaded, emotionally bruised; he’s acquired the gravitas that comes with loss. And the passionate, hands-on commitment with which the actor approaches each stunt, emphasizing practical execution over effects, has only intensified through the years. No one can accuse Cruise of being a performer who fails to deliver what his audience wants. Which includes running. So much running.

In that sense, Dead Reckoning Part One works like gangbusters. If something has been discarded in the storytelling craft along the way, it’s unlikely that the core fanbase will mind. But McQuarrie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Erik Jendresen (an Emmy winner for Band of Brothers), invests so much in the almost nonstop set-pieces that the connective narrative tissue becomes virtually disposable.

Sometimes it feels as if he’s boiled down the most thrilling elements, not only of the Mission: Impossible series, but of the Bond and Bourne movies, and threaded them into a sizzle reel. There’s less sense here of a story that demanded to be told in two parts — this one running two-and-three-quarter hours — than of McQuarrie and Cruise having a bunch more jaw-dropping stunts they plan to pull off and new travel-porn locations on which to unleash mayhem.

Tapping with uncannily sharp timing into a very now anxiety, the plot revolves around artificial intelligence gone rogue — “the perfect covert operation” — and the suavely sinister terrorist seeking to control it, Gabriel (Esai Morales).

The A.I. development harnesses the power to make everything from people to vessels of war undetectable, to turn allies into enemies, commandeer defense systems and manipulate the world’s finance markets. It has become a monster with a mind of its own that knows everything about everyone and can be controlled only with a cruciform key made of two bejeweled parts lost in the Russian submarine disaster that opens the movie.

As the motivation for a globe-hopping hunt to find the two halves of the key and slot them together to tame the A.I. renegade before Gabriel can get his paws on it, it’s a serviceable plot. But it’s elaborated in numbing scenes lumped in among the fun stuff, with Ethan and his associates trudging through leaden exposition dumps, intoning gravely about “The Entity,” as it’s come to be known. Ominous statements are batted about like, “Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth,” which I guess is tangible enough as a threat to world order.

But when we get to see the digital mega-brain at work, looking like a giant fibrous, pulsating cyber sphincter, the whole thing becomes a bit silly. And if after the first half-hour or so you’re still following the plotting intricacies of how the parts of the key got to wherever they are, whether they’re real or fake, who has them and how the IMF crew plans to get them back, congratulations.

Coming after the series high of 2018’s Fallout, in which McQuarrie found an ideal balance of story, character and turbocharged spectacle, this aspect of the film, it must be acknowledged, is disappointing. If De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was considered overly complicated, the storyline here is an absolute maze. But then, as soon as Ethan starts going at it with a pair of trained assassins in a tight Venetian vicoletto, or any number of other bravura sequences in beautiful locations, you’re unlikely to care much about all that Entity blather.

Until the previous entry in the franchise, Mission: Impossible – Fallout (the one with Henry Cavill reloading his forearms), these movies largely stood alone, but Dead Reckoning Part One reaches into the past on numerous fronts. The return of the first movie’s morally dubious intelligence head, Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), serves less as a wistful cameo and more as a throwback to the series’ neo-noir roots – a welcome antidote to a summer overrun with empty nostalgia à la The Flash and the new Indiana Jones. Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) need to go rogue in Dead Reckoning is a direct result of characters and events of the original, Brian De Palma-directed Mission: Impossible, leading to a scenario where Hunt’s own government can’t be trusted with the movie’s dangerous McGuffin: an all-powerful, artificially intelligent algorithm dubbed “the Entity.”

Each one of McQuarrie’s movies has felt distinct from each other. With this movie, it seems as if he is putting his spin on the feel of Brian de Palma’s original Mission: Impossible movie from 1996. There is a lot of that tension, especially from the original film’s opening act, where the characters are racing to keep up with the looming terror around them. The film even brings back Ethan’s sleight-of-hand magic, Henry Czerny as Kittridge, and a finale action sequence set on a train. McQuarrie takes everything great about that original film and combines it with the flair that he has consistently brought to this series.

It takes a while to get into the groove of Dead Reckoning, which trades the gliding high gloss of Fallout for something grainier, stranger, more comedic. Its harsh camera angles evoke Brian De Palma’s 1996 Mission: Impossible film, no doubt a direct allusion. There’s even a climactic train sequence in Dead Reckoning, just as there was 27 years ago. McQuarrie seems done aping (and, occasionally, upping) Christopher Nolan and is returning to the M:I franchise’s roots. Understandable, given that we are, allegedly, approaching the end of its run.

Cruise shows little signs of slowing, even if his timing is off as he uncharacteristically struggles to get Dead Reckoning’s gears turning. But the stakes of the film make it feel as if finality is in the offing: a sentient AI is threatening the entire world, while human-led nations (and a couple of criminal enterprises) do a mad scramble to get it under their control. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, either super spy or demigod, finds himself at the center of this narrative, largely for personal reasons. The memory of a lost love comes whispering out of the past while a contemporary, quasi-romantic relation is tossed into new peril. The macro and the micro are at risk from a holistic threat, one that will define the core mission of Ethan’s life.

Which, arguably, was also true of Fallout, but Dead Reckoning works hard to sell its even-bigger-ness. The AI stuff is too magical sci-fi for my taste—AI is a creeping menace, surely, but this foe plays too B-movie (think, Transcendence) and too all-powerful (think any superhero movie) for the relatively sophisticated Mission: Impossible films. It’s difficult to take things seriously, then, as McQuarrie (who wrote the script with Eric Jendresen) throws a heap of exposition at us while also trying to keep things light. (There’s a Roman street chase involving a tiny yellow Fiat, for example.) The balance is off, which even Cruise’s agility can’t correct.

An hour or so in, though, the film finds its footing, somewhere around the time that Ethan and his coterie of helpers (including new player Hayley Atwell, as a master thief in way over her head) arrive in Venice. There the film’s De Palmian moodiness is put to good use, in an arresting and somber sequence set in the impossibly narrow streets of the world’s most picturesque city. That then leads our hero to the stunt to end all stunts, one already shown almost in its entirety in promotional videos released months ago. It’s a shame that this jaw-dropping act—in which Tom Cruise pilots a motorcycle off a cliff and then does a sort of mid-air, Alpine BASE jump—has been spoiled. Technically impressive as it is, it’s been sapped of surprise.

But the subsequent train set piece is a satisfying stunner, unrelenting and convincing even in its dubious physics. I suppose it’s fitting enough that a Part One should really only get up to speed when it’s nearly over; that steadily built momentum is meant to rocket us into the finale, which will be released next year.

The first half of a two-part story, Dead Reckoning Part One is an exhilarating blockbuster, distilling pure spectacle into a two-and-a-half hour feature. It’s also the first time Mission: Impossible is deep in conversation with itself. McQuarrie departs from his action-first style to pay homage to Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible — all intense close-ups, canted angles, and heightened, pulpy paranoia. This creates a sense of full-circle continuity the Mission: Impossible films rarely have, but it also feels like McQuarrie is playing in another director’s sand box when he should be doing what he does best: delivering Tom Cruise’s latest death-defying stunt in the most breathtaking, jaw-dropping way possible. It’s in those moments that Dead Reckoning Part One transcends anything any other action tentpole can even dream of touching.

Why did Cruise, his first-time producing partner Paula Wagner, a multitude of screenwriters including Steven Zaillian, David Koepp & Robert Towne, and ultimately Brian De Palma, choose to destroy the very fabric of, what on the face of it, made Mission Impossible Mission Impossible? Because if you watch the film, and compare it with the TV series, they are without a doubt different beasts.

Mind you, De Palma fools you into believing it might be a faithful adaptation with his first act, following the opening sequence whereby Phelps, Hunt and the IMF team use a range of theatrics. There are the infamous masks which would become a staple of the entire ensuing franchise, through to a con job using sets, performances and disguises, in order to get what they need from a target.

The sixth film, Fallout, pays homage to this in a similar sequence before its own credit sequence, but the difference here is that the audience are in on the performance. De Palma gives us what we expect from Mission Impossible: teamwork, staging and illusion.

The credits, which recall the original series too with a reworking of Lalo Schiffrin’s iconic theme and flashes of the mission to come, reinforce De Palma’s own illusion. The longer con is on the audience themselves.

Hence why, when De Palma by the end of the first act, kills almost the entirety of the IMF team—including seemingly Phelps himself—during a mission that everyone expects them to succeed in as part of the greater challenge, you are left reeling. This has to be part of the illusion of the narrative, surely? The IMF team can’t all be dead! The clue is in casting Cruise, whose shelf-life as a global cinematic superstar is perhaps one of the most durable in Hollywood history. Cruise is now in his fifth decade as a leading man. Just let that sink in a moment. By the mid-90’s, he was very much established thanks to films from Top Gun all the way through to A Few Good Men. Cruise’s name was above the poster. Cruise was Mission Impossible now. This early on, however, we just didn’t know it.

In short, Mission Impossible does not yet understand Ethan Hunt. It presents a very different character to the one Cruise eventually builds. Ethan, here, is the begrudging, vengeful spy betrayed, as far as he is concerned, by his own government after he is fitted up as a mole inside the IMF. The prey of the CIA, in the form of Henry Czerny’s delightfully officious Kittridge.

It kickstarts what would become some of Mission Impossible’s most popular tropes, second only perhaps to the mask disguises – the mole and the disavowal. There is not one Mission Impossible film which does not either contain a mole working within American intelligence or Ethan’s loyalty and fidelity being questioned. All of this began in Mission Impossible the moment Ethan Hunt loses his team, because even despite characters such as Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell becoming a loyal ally over successive films, not one picture in this franchise has Ethan working, truly, as the cog inside a functional unit. Ethan is the machine.

De Palma’s film is, principally, a deconstruction of what made the 1960’s TV series work. That show was created at the height of the Cold War, with American and Soviet tensions providing a backdrop for the kind of television that would take the post-war austerity of the 1950’s and frame it in glossier, brighter contexts. Mission Impossible came from the same Desilu Productions stable as Star Trek, which premiered the year before and as MI portrayed a unit which using trickery and manipulation to overcome the enemy, Star Trek looked forward to a future in which the hostilities of the Cold War would be a thing of the past in a new American, even globally united, frontier. Both shows even share Star Trek breakout star Leonard Nimoy as part of their casts.

Whereas Star Trek permeated and managed a breakthrough toward the tail end of the darker 1970s in the American consciousness, Mission Impossible struggled to bring its brand of theatrical fancy back to a public who had moved on past the anxieties of the Cold War. Its return in the late 80’s, just a couple of years before the end of the century-defining conflict, didn’t last long.

By the time De Palma’s big screen adaptation was in production, the Cold War was over. The Russian bear had been put down and, suddenly, American espionage didn’t work in the same way. Despite nasty brush fire wars across the 90’s such as Iraq or Kosovo, Mission Impossible returned in the decade defined by Francis Fukuyama in his book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ as the titular ‘end of history’.

Koepp and Towne’s eventual, credited script reflects this in Jim Phelps. When he is unmasked as the villainous architect of the NOC List theft, Phelps’ rationale is revealed in dialogue he offers freely to Ethan in outlining the mindset of the villain, Job, he is trying to convince Ethan exists:

You think about it Ethan, it was inevitable. No more Cold War. No more secrets you keep from yourself. Answer to no one but yourself. Then you wake up one morning and find out the President is running the country without your permission. The son of a bitch, how dare he? Then you realise, it’s over. You are an obsolete piece of hardware, not worth upgrading, you got a lousy marriage and sixty two grand a year.

There is quite a lot to unpick here. Principally the fact that Phelps’ turn to the dark side, the betrayal of his country and the American values we saw his same character embody in the 1960’s, at the height of the conflict against the Soviets, was fuelled by the lack of a defined ‘enemy’ for the intelligence community to fight. The destruction of his team also represents a pre-millennial fear that the enemy could be anywhere, even within. As opposed to the ideological Communist bloc close in our mind’s eye, but in literal terms far from our homeland.

Mission Impossible‘s revival reflects a world filled with shadowy, unknown forces who could strike anywhere, at any time, right at the heart of where we feel safe. It almost prefigures the rise of spontaneous terrorism. Ultimately, Mission Impossible is trying to understand its place in a new geopolitical landscape, as well as in the changing trends and emerging post-modern narratives of the 1990s.

Phelps in his soliloquy also mentions ‘hardware’ and this hints at the emergence of technological means in the post-Cold War paradigm that would replace the need for spies in the field doing the heavy lifting. This is in its infancy in Mission Impossible, which feels quite charming in watching Vanessa Redgrave’s playful arms dealer Max trying to upload floppy discs onto a computer system before the Channel Tunnel cuts off her connection. But the point remains that intelligence agencies now no longer need men like Phelps.

Conversely, De Palma also wonders if they need the IMF, hence why he happily takes down the team thanks to their insider, and leaves Ethan free and clear to create his own ramshackle group of mercenaries to help him clear his name – primarily in the standout CIA Langley set piece, which remains one of the most impressive, iconic and not to mention tense, sequences in action cinema of the last thirty years.

Mission Impossible does not sell Ethan, in this film, as any kind of James Bond proxy. Cruise’s charm is perfectly evident but Ethan is not a seductive, one-man killing machine, or indeed the death-defying nihilist he becomes post-MI3. Ethan here is a touch more enigmatic and distant, which befits the colder stylistics of De Palma’s approach to the material. His lens channels Hitchcock while imbuing the frame with a distinctly De Palma-level of paranoia.

Underfunded, sketchily written, and heavily cut (maybe one reason the writing seems sketchy), Brian De Palma’s Domino still puts contemporary thrillers to shame. The story is standard-issue right-wing melodrama with some loop the loops: Two Danish cops, Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, fresh from Game of Thrones) and Alex (Carice van Houten, same) hunt a Libyan immigrant named Ezra Tarzi (Eriq Ebouaney) who killed Christian’s partner (who was also Alex’s illicit lover) — not fully realizing that Tarzi is being protected by the CIA, led by Guy Pearce’s Joe Martin. Why does the agency allow Tarzi to hack a bloody path through Europe? Because he can do (and is very talented at doing) what the CIA by law cannot: locating, torturing, and killing ISIS operatives in a quest to kill the sheikh who murdered his humanitarian father.

The script is full of little digs at liberals (the sheikh was released from Guantánamo; Denmark is so fashionably leftist), but De Palma doesn’t seem interested in the politics. For him, Domino is a late-career exploration of ideas that have obsessed him for 50-odd years. One is the hypnotic pull of subjective camera footage. The ISIS terrorists use filmed violence to turn people on, at one point sending a young woman to document her murders on the red carpet of the Netherlands Film Festival (“Ending the lives of infidels is a great thing. Scaring the millions of others who see it live on TV is something even greater!”) and planning a massacre in a bullfight arena that will be shot by a hovering drone.

Most of all, De Palma proves that greatest suspense (and horror) come from helplessness, a sense of impotence. Christian sees his partner bleeding out and the suspect escaping over a slate roof and is torn between his dual duties, but De Palma doesn’t quicken the pace the way most directors would. Instead, time stretches out, gravity pulls harder, and the air seems to thicken, agonizingly. The showstopper climax has the stately, “Bolero”-like rhythm of the first sequence of Femme Fatale, while also recalling the nightmarishly protracted tragedies of The Fury and Blow Out and so many other De Palma films. The heroes have to work out complex spatial-temporal equations at lightning speed — but slowed down by factors of two, then four, then eight, until your heart feels like it will explode.

What has pissed off early audiences (and many critics) about Domino is that the payoffs fall short of the buildups. A swift kick in the groin is unintentionally comic. A major character dispatched too abruptly makes De Palma seem glib. I’d like to see his full cut someday. Meanwhile, you should ignore the terrible reviews. I’d like to think the crates of tomatoes that are a running motif and figure in the plot are a tacit acknowledgment that the Tomatometer doesn’t always tell the truth.

4K DUAL FORMAT LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

• Limited edition packaging with reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Obviously Creative
• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring newly-commissioned artwork by Tom Ralston and Obviously Creative
• Seven double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Barry Forshaw and original production notes

DISC ONE: FEATURE (4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY)

• 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (2160p) presentation in High Dynamic Range
• Original stereo, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-X audio
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Brand new audio commentary by Matt Zoller Seitz, author of The Wes Anderson Collection and The Soprano Sessions
• Brand new audio commentary by Dr. Douglas Keesey, author of Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen: A Life in Film

DISC TWO: FEATURE AND EXTRAS (BLU-RAY)

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• Original stereo and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Brand new audio commentary by Matt Zoller Seitz
• Brand new audio commentary by Dr Douglas Keesey
• Carlito and the Judge, a brand new interview with Judge Edwin Torres, author of the novels Carlito’s Way and After Hours on which the screenplay for Carlito’s Way is based
• Cutting Carlito’s Way, a brand new interview with editors Bill Pankow and Kristina Boden
• De Palma’s Way, a brand new appreciation by film critic David Edelstein
• All the Stitches in the World: The Locations of Carlito’s Way, a brand new look at the New York locations of Carlito’s Way and how they look today
• De Palma on Carlito’s Way, an archival interview with director Brian De Palma
• The Making of Carlito’s Way, an archival documentary on the making of the film, produced for the original DVD release
• Original promotional featurette
• Theatrical teaser and trailer
• Image gallery
• Deleted Scenes

Over the last three decades, Cruise has become so indelibly linked with the Mission: Impossible franchise that it’s easy to forget what an unlikely project this actually was for him. It’s adapted from the CBS TV series that ran from 1966 to 1973. The whole point of TV’s Mission: Impossible was the team. It was an ensemble drama focused on a secret government espionage group. From the second series onward, the sleek, silver-haired Peter Graves was the star but Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris and Peter Lupus also had major roles.

In 1993, Paramount needed to do something dramatic to hold on to Cruise. After his success in the legal thriller The Firm (1993), he was already becoming Hollywood’s most bankable star. As Variety reported at the time, studio execs began desperately “scouring their properties to find a killer, franchise-type project for Cruise”. Mission: Impossible was what they came up with as bait for their prize asset. This was a period when other stars were also appearing in movies inspired by small-screen dramas. Harrison Ford was in The Fugitive (1993) and Mel Gibson played the lead in Maverick (1994).

Cruise had watched and liked Mission: Impossible as a kid. Nonetheless, he didn’t seem a natural fit for the big screen spin-off. He was the brash, toothsome boy wonder of Hollywood, not the type to play a hard-bitten spy in a murky and cerebral drama involving clandestine US government operations in Europe.

Brian De Palma was brought on board as director after Cruise met him through Spielberg. The actor went home after having dinner with the two directors and binge-watched almost all of De Palma’s films in a single sitting – and then offered him the job.

On one level, it was an astute decision. The award-winning filmmaker behind The Untouchables, (1987) Casualties of War (1989) and Carlito’s Way (1993) was a strong-willed auteur who wasn’t going to worry about upsetting the fans of the original series. The downside was that he was too big a personality simply to work as a hired hand.

There was something wanton and cruel about the way almost all the supporting actors in the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) team are dispatched so early in the movie.

“I said the first thing we have to do is kill off the whole team,” De Palma later observed of his scorched earth policy toward the other spies in the story.

Alfred Hitchcock famously had Janet Leigh stabbed to death in the shower around 45 minutes into Psycho (1960) but De Palma gets rid of Emilio Estevez, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ingeborga Dapkūnaite far more quickly. In its opening scenes, their characters all register strongly. They’re shown working together in a mission in Ukraine and then being debriefed by their boss Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) as they prepare for their next assignment in Prague. As spies go, they’re likeable, resourceful and attractive but that doesn’t stop De Palma culling them in ruthless fashion. One is impaled head-first on the spokes of a malfunctioning lift. Another is stabbed to death. They die very operatic deaths, clearing the decks so that what starts as a multi-character movie can turn into a Cruise vehicle.

Those associated with the TV series were appalled. In interviews, Graves expressed his dismay that mission leader Jim Phelps, whom he had played in staunchly heroic fashion, was now being portrayed in such a verminous light by Voight .“I am sorry they [the producers] chose to call him Phelps,” he complained, suggesting a different name would have been more appropriate. Graves appeared to think that Voight’s Phelps had nothing to do with the man he had played. An alternative reading is that after all those years working in the shadows for the US government and being paid so poorly, Phelps had simply turned rotten.

His co-star Landau was equally upset at the decision to destroy the Mission Impossible team. De Palma didn’t care. He had signed up for Mission: Impossible for one very specific reason. “I was determined to make a huge hit,” he admitted to fellow filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake [Paltrow] when they made their 2015 documentary about him. De Palma knew that for this to happen, Cruise had to be in as many scenes as possible.

One of the enduring fascinations of Mission: Impossible is the attrition between the star and the director. There are several accounts that claim they didn’t get on at all – although it’s unclear why they fell out. Some claimed that Cruise balked at doing the stunt in which Ethan was almost drowned after an aquarium in a restaurant explodes.

It didn’t help that the script was being reworked even as shooting was continuing. A small army of writers was involved, from David Koepp, whose credits range from Jurassic Park to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Steven Zaillian, then best known for Schindler’s List, and Chinatown’s Robert Towne.

In spite of the best efforts of these scribes, the plotting is very creaky. It is there simply to link the action set-pieces at the heart of the movie. There are non-sequiturs and baffling moments in which Ethan, a master of disguise, puts on or rips off masks and changes his identity. Everyone is in pursuit of a floppy disk containing the so-called NOC list of covert secret agents.

For all its contrivances, this remains a full-blooded De Palma movie, bursting with his usual directorial flourishes. From the meticulously choreographed interrogation scene that opens the movie to the continual sleights of hand and trompe l’oeil effects, slow motion explosions, scenes in which dreams and reality seem to blur and even the ruby red lipstick worn by the doomed Scott Thomas that matches the blood from her stab wound, make the film very recognisably the work of its director. Miraculously, it also succeeds as a Cruise action picture. Critics picked up on the film’s many references to Hitchcock. Sight and Sound called it “an explosion of pleasures”, comparing it to North by Northwest and praised De Palma for making the story match the relentless tempo of the famous Mission Impossible theme song by Lalo Schifrin. It was re-recorded for the film by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen of U2.

Nor was it a case of Cruise demanding more spectacle while the highbrow director fought for a greater emphasis on character development. De Palma insisted in a 1998 interview with Premiere magazine that he was the one who fought against fierce opposition for the wonderfully overblown, Wagnerian helicopter, train and tunnel chase that ends the movie.

Mission Impossible is an exercise in pastiche but it is glorious pastiche. The bravura sequence in which Cruise’s Ethan dangles spider-style from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is inspired by the heist in the French thriller Rififi (1955) in which the thieves chisel through the ceiling of the apartment they’re robbing. The De Palma touch, though, is the close-up on the drop of sweat that Cruise catches in his hand, when if it hits the floor, the alarms will go off.

“One of these is enough,” an exhausted De Palma told Cruise when the actor asked him to make a sequel to Mission: Impossible. After he bowed out, John Woo, JJ Abrams, Brad Bird and Chris McQuarrie went on to direct further instalments of the franchise.

The tone of the movies has changed dramatically since 1996. The redoubtable Ving Rhames is still there as Ethan’s trusted sidekick Luther, but most of the other actors are long gone. The films have become lighter and yet more self-parodic. The stunts are as astounding as ever but what you don’t find is the sheer cinematic chutzpah that De Palma brought to the franchise. No one is comparing them to Hitchcock movies anymore.

The songs on Rise of the Rebel Angels go in so many directions stylistically. There’s rock, power-pop, glam, folk, piano ballads, punkier things. Where do you take musical influence from?

There’s so much. I love the Pretenders; Chrissie Hynde is a huge hero. Jeff Buckley. Oasis. The Beatles, obviously. Frank Black and the Pixies. Tom Waits. Mark Lanegan. The Replacements. Prince. I also love stuff like System of a Down – I’m really a huge fan of Daron Malakian’s guitar playing and songwriting.

And Julee Cruise – those records where Angelo Badalamenti did the music and David Lynch did the words: I’m a massive fan of those, especially the first one, [1989’s] Floating Into the Night. And of course I love all the ’70s glam stuff, like T. Rex, Bowie, Mott the Hoople. Sweet, Slade… All of that.

You play a variety of instruments on the record. But is guitar your go-to?

It’s definitely the instrument I feel most fluent on. I love drums and I love piano, but guitar comes easiest to me and it’s the one I’ve been playing the longest.

Is it your main songwriting tool?

Usually. Sometimes I’ll write on piano, or a synth sound will trigger something in me. Every once in a while I’ll write something in my head, like on a plane flight or when I’m out walking. But usually it’s from messing around on an acoustic guitar and finding some chords or a melody that feels good.

That’s what happened with, for instance, “Wrong Dove,” which is the second-to-last song on the album. I was just goofing around on the couch with a 12-string acoustic. And in retrospect, I can see that I’d been listening to a lot of [musician and producer] Alex G. I can hear that in it. It has that same kind of high falsetto vocal.

There’s also some great lead guitar work on the record, in particular on songs like “Everywhere All the Time,” and the first single, “Let It Rust,” which have very expressive slide work. And the closing track, “Live to Ride,” features a really over-the-top multitracked lead.

“Everywhere All the Time,” the lead in that is the melody from the theme from Body Double, the Brian De Palma film, which I’ve always loved. There’s always little musical Easter eggs that I’m intentionally or unintentionally leaving in. And I just thought that sounded cool in the song.

And something like “Live to Ride” – sometimes I get tired of having a pop tune with, like, a really tasteful solo. So on that one I was thinking more like Steve Vai, like, “How can I like ruin this song?” [laughs] And don’t get me wrong – I love Steve Vai. That’s not disparagement. I just thought that most people wouldn’t take a tune like that and put like a shredding solo on it. To me that felt sort of vulgar and inappropriate, which is why I wanted to do it. That one was done with the Schecter with the Sustainiac and the Floyd Rose, and I double- and triple-tracked it in places.

Wrapped loosely in the packaging of a documentary, "Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of the Midnight Cowboy," is written and directed by Nancy Buirski. It features Jon Voight, Bob Balaban, Brian de Palma, Charles Kaiser, Lucy Sante, Brenda Vaccaro, the voice of John Schlesinger, and many others who either were in "Midnight Cowboy," involved in its production, or were admirers of the film.

When the documentary opens with a closeup of Jon Voight, recalling an existential crisis by director John Schlesinger after the completion of "Midnight Cowboy," the film almost implicitly states that it will be about the creation of that film. Yet, "Desperate Souls" only lightly touches on the creation of "Cowboy." Instead, this film spends most of its time investigating the era during which it was made. "Midnight Cowboy" lived at the nexus of a war, the civil rights movement, and the early beginnings of the gay rights movement.

A movie, good, bad or indifferent, is always “about” something. But some movies are about more things than others, and as you watch “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy,” Nancy Buirski’s rapt, incisive, and beautifully exploratory making-of-a-movie documentary, what comes into focus is that “Midnight Cowboy” was about so many things that audiences could sink into the film as if it were a piece of their own lives.

The movie was about loneliness. It was about dreams, sunny yet broken. It was about gay male sexuality and the shock of really seeing it, for the first time, in a major motion picture. It was about the crush and alienation of New York City: the godless concrete carnival wasteland, which had never been captured onscreen with the telephoto authenticity it had here. The movie was also about the larger sexual revolution — what the scuzziness of “free love” really looked like, and the overlap between the homoerotic and hetero gaze. It was about money and poverty and class and how they could tear your soul apart. It was about how the war in Vietnam was tearing the soul of America apart. It was about a new kind of acting, built on the realism of Brando, that also went beyond it.

And it was about love. Jon Voight’s Joe Buck, that rangy Texas good ol’ boy with his fringed buckskin jacket and his jutting-front-teeth grin and his sexy bright naïveté, and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo, sweaty and unshaven, long hair greased back, hobbling through the streets, hording his change in a shoe with a hole in it and no sock — these two had nothing in common except that they were losers, hanging by a thread, and only after a while did they realize that they had nothing in the world but each other.

The risky, offhand greatness of “Midnight Cowboy” is that the movie, while it knew it was about a lot of these things, also didn’t know it was about a lot of these things. More, perhaps, than any other formative New Hollywood landmark (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Easy Rider”), the film channeled the world around it. “Desperate Souls, Dark City” tells the story of how “Midnight Cowboy” got made, and how the people who made it — the director John Schlesinger, the screenwriter Waldo Salt, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, and James Leo Herlily, who wrote the 1965 novel on which the film was based — took the essence of who they were and poured it into a personal vision of what we were seeing onscreen.

As a documentary filmmaker, Nancy Buirski (“By Sidney Lumet”) comes at you from a heady impressionistic angle. For all its tasty anecdotes, and there are lots of them, “Desperate Souls” is less concerned with production war stories, with the everyday nuts and bolts of how “Midnight Cowboy” got made (we see the famous scene in which Ratso bangs on a car and shouts “I’m walkin’ heah,” but don’t get the usual story about shooting the scene), than with the emotional metaphysics of how a movie about a blinkered hustler and a homeless loser came to embody what Hollywood was becoming: not a dream factory but a truth factory, an eerie moving mirror of who we were.