It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Scott Tobias here again with...

Keith Phipps.

Genevieve Kosky and Tasha Robinson.

On the first half of this episode, we discussed Brian DePalma's Mission Impossible, which launched the biggest franchise of the biggest movie star in Hollywood.

With this half, we'll look at Mission Impossible Fallout, in which De Palma is long gone,

but Tom Cruise remains, 22 years later, shattering bones and risking his life for our edification.

With Fallout, the Mission Impossible franchise has, for the first time, used the same director twice.

That director is Christopher Macquarie, who made his name in Hollywood for writing the screenplay for the usual suspects,

wrote the script for the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, and has now directed four films for crews,

two Jack Reachers and two Mission Impossibles.

And with a continuity in direction,

Fallout is also the first Mission Impossible to have a pretty decent amount of continuity in the

plotting, too. The villain from the last film, Rogue Nation, his name is Solomon Lane. He's back,

though now that Lane has been captured, his terrorist organization, once known as the syndicate,

has now been reformed

into the Apostles. Rebecca Ferguson has also returned as Ilsa Faust, a former MI6 agent who

helped Ethan Hunt at his IMF team in the last film, but is walking a bit of an intelligence

tightrope in this one. The plot is, of course, the usual nonsense. As the film opens, Ethan tries to

...