MIFF: Cold War, hot war

I'll be brief as it is after midnight and I am falling behind on my blogging.

I saw a double feature on my MIFF Sunday night, but only one was actually a MIFF movie. The other was "the greatest action movie of the 21st century," or so some people are saying.

One had the implied threat of the use of nuclear weapons hanging over it, one had the very real threat of very real nuclear weapons suffusing it. Hence my clever title.

But I really only want to tell you about Cold War, as others have told you about Mission: Impossible - Fallout, if you have not seen it for yourself.

Cold War continues a personal MIFF tradition of seeing the follow-up movie to recent movies by acclaimed international directors that I ranked very highly on my year-end lists. Past examples have included Graduation in 2016 from Cristian Mungiu (his previous two features had ranked #1 and #2 in their respective years), The Salesman from Asghar Farhadi in 2016 (A Separation was my #1 of 2011) and After the Storm from Hirokazu Kore-eda in 2016 (Like Father, Like Son was my #2 of 2014). Kore-eda and Farhadi each also have films I'm seeing in this year's MIFF, as I saw Kore-eda's Shoplifters last Friday night and have Farhadi's Everybody Knows due up on Tuesday. I suspect MIFF 2019 will be the perfect time for Maren Ade's follow-up to my #1 of 2016, Toni Erdmann.

But I'm straying, and I said I'd be brief.

Polish director Pawel Powlikowski directed my #3 movie of 2014, Ida, which is a masterpiece. Cold War is similarly shot in black and white and similarly deals with Poland in the decades following World War II, when it's struggling with the legacy of the war and the control of Communist forces.

My full review is to the right, but let's just say it's no Ida. However, I do also suspect that this one will grow on me the more I think about it. It's not entirely unexpected, either, as both Graduation and The Salesman felt like letdowns compared to the movies that preceded them. (After the Storm did too, a bit, but at least that one got four stars from me.)

Mission: Impossible?

I quite enjoyed it, but it's not the best action movie of the 21st century. In fact, it's not even the best action in a 21st century Mission: Impossible movie. That honor goes to Ghost Protocol and its exhilarating Burj Khalifa sequence. The Burj Khalifa always trumps.