00 Week: Planes with atom bombs don't get stolen in real life. Except that they do. You're slowing down, James... Don't give me that crap about real life. There ain't no such animal.

THUNDERBALL

1965

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ian Fleming, Richard Maibaum, and John Hopkins

Spoilers: severe

00 Week: Now you're talking. What are we going to do? Rob the end of a rainbow?

GOLDFINGER

1964

Directed by Guy Hamilton

Written by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

Turning Lebanon into a Lebaoui

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

2025

Directed by Wes Anderson

Written by Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson

Spoilers: moderate

00 Week: In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

1963 UK/1964 USA

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkeley Mather (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

You spend too much time on the Internet!

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-THE FINAL RECKONING

2025

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Written by Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie

Spoilers: moderate

Or, The Misdirects of Mr. E

THE MYSTERY OF MR. X

1934

Directed by Edgar Selwyn

Written by Howard Emmett Rogers and Monckton Hoffe (based on the novel X v. Rex by Philip MacDonald)

Spoilers: moderate

The girl without dinner

CHICKEN FOR LINDA!

Linda veut du poulet !

2023 eux/2024 nous

Written and directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach

Spoilers: moderate

Hundreds of beavers

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

2024

Directed by Ethan Coen

Written by Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen

Spoilers: moderate

Ocean's Week: Screw Sinatra's hand

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN

2007

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien

Spoilers: moderate

Ocean's Week: It's not in my nature to be mysterious, but I can't talk about it, and I can't talk about why

OCEAN'S TWELVE

2004

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by George Nolfi

Spoilers: high

Ocean's Week: I have a question. Say we get into the cage, through the security doors there, and down the elevator we can't move, and past the guards with the guns, and into the vault we can't open...

OCEAN'S ELEVEN

2001

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written by Ted Griffin

Spoilers: moderate

Ocean's Week: Fifty percent of something is better than one hundred percent of nothing

OCEAN'S 11

1960

Directed by Lewis Milestone

Written by George Clayton Johnson, Jack Golden Russell, Harry Brown, and Charles Lederer

Spoilers: moderate

What a disaster: The Jerry Jameson TV roundup, part 1

In which we discuss Heatwave!, Hurricane, and The Elevator.

Our retrospective of the disaster cinema of the 1970s left its main phase back when we arrived at 1980, whereupon we treated with Irwin Allen's final effort, When Time Ran Out..., as well as, of course, the parody that was disaster cinema's own disaster, somewhat killing the genre off for years to come, Airplane!; after that, there was no real compulsion to be even more thorough than I already had been, as there would only be side-quests left anyway, and these were to be completed at leisure and for their own pleasure: Airplane II: The Sequel; the original disaster cinema parody, The Big Bus; and one day, I swear I'll get to the Japanese branch of the genre.  For now, there's this.  Obviously, nobody is forcing me, and I doubt it would have occurred to anybody to even ask me, to backtrack through the television movies of Jerry Jameson.  But I did anyway.  (Then again, there was that guy who kept at me, justifiably enough, for like two years to finally get to Raise the Titanic.)  Initially, this was supposed to be a stopgap for the lull in reviews this late July—minimalist reviews, cross-posted from Letterboxd and cleaned up.  Well, they're not going to be maximalist.  But the main thing is that later on I still want to tell you about Starflight One, a very cool TV disaster movie from all the way out in the wilderness of 1983, this being a telefilm directed by, you guessed, Jerry Jameson; and if that was to have a place here, then it only feels right to deal with all of his other disaster telefilms, of which there were at least three and perhaps six, depending on your definition of "disaster movie."  (ETA: oh, for hell's sake, there's seven.)  We'll be going broader with that definition than I actually believe is correct, but there are so many fuzzy lines in life, aren't there?  To be clear, this does not open the way towards a pathologically completionist "all disaster films of the 70s, even the TV movies" campaign, or at least I hope it doesn't.

Some would say that the Earth is our moon

FLY ME TO THE MOON

2024

Directed by Greg Berlanti

Written by Bill Kirstein, Keenan Flynn, and Rose Gilroy

Spoilers: moderate (somewhat inapplicable, obviously)

American Gothic Week: Balkanized

BLOOD BATH or PORTRAIT IN TERROR

aka Operation: Titian or Track of the Vampire

1966 or 1968

Directed by Rados Novakovic or Jack Hill or Stephanie Rothman

Written by Vlastimir Radovanovic or Jack Hill or Stephanie Rothman

Spoilers: moderate

The ecstasy of gold

KELLY'S HEROES

1970

Directed by Brian G. Hutton

Written by Troy Kennedy Martin

Spoilers: moderate

He's a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos!

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-DEAD RECKONING, PART ONE

2023

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Written by Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie

Spoilers: moderate

It's an almost vanished way of life, not easy to hold onto... and terribly expensive to maintain

FITZWILLY

1967

Directed by Delbert Mann

Written by Isobel Lennart (based on the novel A Garden of Cucumbers by Poyznt Tyler)

Spoilers: moderate

The movie that does not advocate the cool crime of robbery

THE BAD GUYS

2022

Directed by Pierre Perifel

Written by Etan Cohen (based on the book series by Aaron Blabey)

Spoilers: mild

Seems like I should be getting somewhere, somehow I'm neither here nor there

BULLET TRAIN

2022

Directed by David Leitch

Written by Zak Olkewicz (based on the novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka)

Spoilers: moderate