Mark Gatiss Archives | Deep Focus Review

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Brian Eggert — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:24:40 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. The Fantastic Four: First Steps comes as close to greatness as MCU movies get. Accented by a dazzling retro-futurist style and strong characters played by a pitch-perfect cast, it adheres to the save-the-world formula found in many superhero movies: Planet Earth faces an impossible threat from outer space, and only the titular heroes can save us. However, instead of the flat digital environments and lack of distinct visual flair found in most movies of this ilk, there’s a wonderful alternate reality for audiences to explore, set in a version of the 1960s replete with spaceships, robots, and flying cars. The movie instills an instant desire to investigate this familiar yet unique world, something most MCU movies cannot claim. Rather than feeling like The Fantastic Four is more of the same, it feels alive and new—an inspired variation on a theme that, admittedly, has already been tackled onscreen but to subpar effect. With a terrific cast who embody their iconic characters and a visual energy that presents a refreshing alternative to the Marvel house style, The Fantastic Four is not only immediately engaging but also one of the MCU’s most satisfying offerings yet. […]

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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Brian Eggert — Thu, 22 May 2025 06:27:41 +0000

Note: This review was originally published on May 15, 2025. Christopher McQuarrie tries to accomplish a lot with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. For this seemingly last entry in one of Hollywood’s most enduring franchises, the director and his co-writer Erik Jendresen attempt a conclusion that weaves together plot points and characters from the last 30 years and seven installments, giving them added significance by folding their storylines into this one. McQuarrie also hopes to create the biggest sequel so far and out-spectacle its predecessors. Even though Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his various team members have saved the world from deadly viruses, terrorist organizations, and nuclear war before, the new entry establishes the most dangerous threat yet—one in which not only truth but all of humanity faces extinction. But the globe-trotting story—leaping from Austria to the Bering Sea, from a top-secret underground location housing the US government to a South African “Doomsday Vault”—is merely the pretense for a blockbuster on a massive scale, costing a reported $400 million. And while the movie delivers incredible popcorn-munching thrills over its nearly three-hour runtime, with Cruise showboating and performing nerve-shattering stunts as only he can, the story underwhelms next to the showmanship […]

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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Brian Eggert — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 17:23:20 +0000

As a critic, it’s sometimes difficult to separate my critical mindset from my fandom for a series. Although I consider myself a critic first and a fan second, certain movies challenge that order. This is especially true of the Mission: Impossible franchise, which started with my favorite of the bunch, Brian DePalma’s 1996 original, dipped near to oblivion with John Woo’s maligned 2000 sequel, and has been steadily terrific since J.J. Abrams revived the franchise in 2006. Tom Cruise’s longtime collaborator Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed the last two superb installments, Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout (2018), but his work on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One can’t help but feel disappointing compared to the last four sequels. It’s not a bad film by any stretch; rather, it’s quite good, full of impressive action sequences and memorable stunts by Cruise. Still, as the critical part of me recognizes a worthy film but questions many of McQuarrie’s choices, which aren’t quite up to the series’ standards, my disappointment as a fan can’t help but accentuate its faults. Collaborating on a Mission: Impossible script for the first time, McQuarrie co-wrote Dead Reckoning with Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers). Their screenplay adopts […]

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The Father

Brian Eggert — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 19:48:49 +0000

Several films over the past few years have confronted the reality of degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. They require performers to capture incomplete characters, people who are losing themselves to the effects of dementia—memory loss, gaps in time, lack of concentration, and failed reasoning skills. Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006) featured Julie Christie in an Oscar-nominated performance as a woman who loses all memory of her former self and marriage. Julianne Moore won the Best Actress Oscar for Still Alice (2014), playing a linguistics professor who ironically loses her sense of speech to the disease. The latest of these dramas, The Father, feels no less Oscar-baity but takes an alternative approach to a similar story. It’s structured according to the disjointed mental state of its central character, Anthony, played by Anthony Hopkins, who gives his best performance in decades. The film’s complete immersion into his mental state offers a heartrending look at the disease by capturing the patchwork of names, faces, and places that Anthony struggles to connect. Based on Florian Zeller’s 2012 play (Le Père), the film is also Zeller’s directorial debut. It’s an incredibly accomplished, well-structured chamber drama, aided in its translation to English by playwright and […]

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The Favourite

Brian Eggert — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 02:49:50 +0000

For Yorgos Lanthimos and his screenwriters of The Favourite, Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, history is an interplay of observation and anachronism. Set during the early 1700s in the court of Queen Anne, the English costume drama is shot with extreme wide-angle lenses, giving the vast interiors, ornamented with immense tapestries and huge, ornate furniture, the look of a fishbowl enclosure into which the audience observes from a bemused distance. What unfolds is not a rigid or even Hollywoodized version of history; rather, the film uses history as a reflector, a platform for another discussion altogether. Whether The Favourite, about two women vying for the good favor of their Queen in a viperous competition, has something specific to say about modern-day politics, gender relations, or the female experience remains debatable. Yet its cynicism and critique of the royal classes, in all of their debauched and base behavior, putrid goutiness, and sexual inelegance, is a target that provides a timeless contrast between the regal setting and the depraved conduct. When a bunch of bewigged nobles toss oranges at a chubby, naked jester in a slow-motion display, one cannot help but think of that intentionally tasteless, ad-libbed joke that ends with the […]

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Christopher Robin

Brian Eggert — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 13:30:47 +0000

Disney has been emptying the hunny pot of writer A.A. Milne and illustrator E.H. Howard’s beloved creation Winnie the Pooh since the 1960s, decades after Milne first created him in 1928. They began with a series of theatrical shorts, then continued to multiple television series, a handful of feature films, along with spinoff titles such as The Tigger Movie (2000) and Piglet’s Big Move (2003). Among the best and most timeless adaptations was their last journey to the Hundred Acre Wood, 2009’s simply titled and 2D-animated Winnie the Pooh, an imaginative adventure of the absent-minded stuffed bear, who drops the occasional profound adage that makes us think. “I used to believe in forever,” said Pooh Bear in one of Milne’s original books. “But forever’s too good to be true.” Whether he’s waxing philosophical about the importance of seizing the moment or chasing his red balloon, Pooh epitomizes an easygoing sweetness, offering a sort of Anglo-Saxon version of the Japanese kawaii aesthetic. Christopher Robin, Disney’s latest attempt to reintroduce Pooh to a new generation, follows their recent trend of creating so-called live-action versions of their classic animated intellectual properties, including Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, and Beauty and the […]

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Denial

Brian Eggert — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 00:00:16 +0000

History remains a precarious field of study. Readers of history often avow historical writings as fact upon their publication by scholars. Historians are meant to investigate the past and document their findings in an objective manner. Objectivity being the key, historians nonetheless shape history into a narrative format better understood by their readers, hence the adage, “History was written by the winners,” which implies that historians are subjective scholars. Whether by design or merely an unintentional result of a particular historian’s chosen topic, the passions of a historian bring a perspective to the historical document, resulting in an analysis shaped by subjective forces. Even worse, there are historians, rare though they may be, who are incapable of objectivity and propagandize their analyses in order to put forth their specific perspective on historical events. In Denial, veteran character actor Timothy Spall plays David Irving, a British historian best known for his 1977 book Hitler’s War, which suggested Adolf Hitler had no knowledge of the mass genocide occurring in Auschwitz or other Nazi death camps. A decade later, Irving released a new edition of his book and therein claimed the Holocaust never occurred. Infamously contentious to those who disagree with him, Irving […]

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