★☆☆☆☆There’s a beautiful line in Mission: Impossible 2, written in 2000 by Robert Towne (Chinatown) and delivered by Anthony Hopkins with world-class aplomb. Hopkins, as the movie’s mission commander, is about to order spy Thandie Newton to sleep with a dangerous international terrorist and to extract information from him. Newton’s new boyfriend, however, played by Tom Cruise, objects, and claims that Newton is simply not trained for this sort of mission. She’s a woman. She’s got all the training she needs.”I kept thinking of this line all the way through the impossibly stupid Red Sparrow, a movie that posits the existence, today, of a…

Source: The Times March 01, 2018 16:52 UTC