
'Tom Cruise's best movie' is now available to stream on Netflix
The Mission Impossible series welcomed its latest release this month, thrilling fans worldwide as Tom Cruise reprised his iconic role as Ethan Hunt.
Yet, the 62-year-old is grabbing attention for a different performance on Netflix, portraying a hard-hitting role in the action-packed thriller Collateral.
The 2004 film Collateral boasts an incredible cast including Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Debi Mazar and Bruce McGill.
In the film, Jamie Foxx portrays a cab driver who's day takes a wild turn when he picks up a hitman, played by Tom Cruise.
Collateral offers viewers an adrenaline rush, with a synopsis reading: "A cab driver realizes his current fare is a hit man who has been having him drive around from mark to mark until the last witness to a crime is dead.
"When the cabbie finally figures out the truth, he must prevent the assassin from wiping out his last witness without becoming the next in the professional killer's line of casualties."
Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Michael Mann, known for masterpieces like Heat, The Last of the Mohicans and Ferrari, Collateral was a box office success, racking up $220 million off a $65 million budget, reports Surrey Live.
The film has been highly praised online, with many hailing it as one of the actor's finest performances. One viewer penned: "I would say it's one of best Tom Cruise movies 'Collateral'."
Another chimed in: "Collateral is my all time favorite Cruise movie outside the MI franchise. I love his works in 2000s era."
A third shared on Rottentomatoes: "An absolute masterpiece." With another adding: "It's perfect. Cast. Story. Cinematography. Soundtrack. Direction. Acting. Climactic ending. The entire package."
Another fan commented: "One of the most intense action thrillers ever. Amazing duo of Tom and Jamie Fox. It's so good to see Tom playing the villain."
With someone else noting: "Great film, Tom Cruise is surprisingly good as a villain."
Echoing these sentiments, with one enthusiast added: "Fantastic, dark action thriller with a really great story, all the performances are top-notch and Tom does a fantastic turn as Vincent. Its rare to find a film with this much character growth packing in with action and suspense."
Collateral is available to stream on Netflix now.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Oh God no, Dad!' The makers of TV's most terrifying monsters reveal their repulsive secrets
When special effects artist Aaron Sims first read the script for Stranger Things, he was struck by how vague the description was for the show's centrepiece monster. 'It basically said, 'The Demogorgon is a tall, lanky creature that eats children,'' recalls Sims. 'I'm thinking, 'OK, that's scary – but what does that actually look like?'' What happened when he posed this question to the series creators Matt and Ross Duffer? 'They said, 'We have no idea – come up with something.'' For Sims, who has worked on films such as The Incredible Hulk, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men, this was a relief. 'When there's already a fanbase, there is a lot of scrutiny and expectation. The fans either love it or hate it – and there's nothing you can do. Working on The Incredible Hulk, for example, took years. So when it's a new creature, a lot of people get excited.' This near-blank canvas led Sims to an unlikely source of inspiration: the snapping mouth of a turtle. 'When a turtle opens its jaws,' he says, 'it looks like it has rows of teeth – but they're actually fibres that draw food inward.' He combined this with a Venus flytrap and the result was that uniquely terrifying head that blooms open like a flower, revealing concentric rings of teeth, then clamps down on its prey, usually a screaming child. The Duffer brothers wanted only one modification: no face. Fans of Stranger Things, which returns later this year, will find plenty to fear in Alien: Earth, which launches this week. Series creator Noah Hawley has promised a terrifying expansion of the film franchise's already frightening monsters, introducing new creatures that will rival – and even surpass – the iconic, swoop-skulled, chest-bothering, teeth-within-teeth xenomorphs. 'I think we're giving them a run for their money, certainly,' Hawley has said. Alien: Earth, which is a prequel to the first 1979 film, leans heavily into unsettling body horror, too, with new creatures such as the T Ocellus, a jellyfish-like parasite that dislodges the eyes of other organisms in order to seize control of them from within. These newcomers will ensure the series isn't just recycling established monsters, but introducing fresh causes of terror and revulsion. Like Sims on Stranger Things, prosthetic makeup designer Barrie Gower leaned heavily on nature when he was creating his monstrous designs for The Infected, the term given to humans who get the brain infection in postapocalyptic zombie horror The Last of Us. Fungus became an integral part of the creative process, with Gower and his team buying so many bags of 'grow your own mushroom kits' for the studio to photograph and 3D print that they soon had 15 species on their hands. 'Fungus,' says Gower, 'is just such an interesting and beautiful kind of growth. There's so much to play with.' Gower effectively had a 'superpower' for creating monsters out of mushrooms: he hates them, despising everything from their smell to their texture. 'It became quite easy to come up with designs that repulsed me,' he says. Along with his mushroom aversion, Gower also has trypophobia, an intense discomfort triggered by the sight of clusters of small holes or bumps. 'It gives you goosebumps,' he says. However, rather than avoiding the formations that make his skin crawl, he employed them for maximum grotesqueness in his designs for how The Infected look, finding the perfect guinea pig in his daughter Lottie, who shares his trypophobia. 'If she's like, 'Oh God no dad, I don't like the look', I know we've succeeded.' The White Walkers, those furrow-faced ice demons in Game of Thrones, required an entirely different approach. Costume designer Michele Clapton envisioned them wearing dark armour that looked salvaged and repurposed, resulting in an austere, unwieldy look. 'It was so, so brutal to make,' Clapton says. 'The cutting and the bending of the metal was incredibly labour intensive. The armorists just loathed it because they really cut themselves. It's almost like a huge cheese grater.' The final pieces of armour proved so hazardous that the team actually had to create much safer leather duplicates for fight sequences, meticulously painted to mimic metal. Protecting all the prosthetics also proved difficult, given the sharp edges. Another major challenge, ironically, was keeping the White Walkers warm while filming in near freezing temperatures. 'We had hot-water bottles we could place inside the costumes,' says Clapton. 'But as there were so many prosthetics, you had to be really careful, because they could easily tear.' In fact, keeping performers comfortable in elaborate costumes and prosthetics is a major headache for monster creators. Gower encountered this with the Bloater – the hulking, spore-spewing, elaborately ridged behemoth in The Last of Us. 'We built this big suit that, in terms of size, was like wearing a sofa,' he says. 'It was made out of a very soft foam latex material. It's like a huge sponge, but split into six sections and zipped on to the performer.' There was one very predictable consequence: 'You just got really hot.' The inside of the costume could become so sweltering that, between shots, the team had to unzip the back and fan down Adam Basil, who portrayed the Bloater, sometimes even putting him in a pop-up tent complete with an air-conditioning unit on full blast to cool him down. According to Gower, the huge weight, restricted movement and the need for agility combined to make the Bloater costume ultimately unworkable. The team ended up enlisting the help of Wētā FX in New Zealand, who took detailed scans of all the Bloater's textures and created a digital version. Such mega-budget productions give creators the luxury of experimentation, with digital backup plans should their monster imaginings go awry. But on shows such as Doctor Who, it's a different story – as special effects artist Neill Gorton discovered. On the BBC's cult show, he encountered something every bit as scary as the Time Lord's weekly foes: a very limited budget. 'It was a comedown in one way,' he says, 'coming from working in Hollywood. I had a production design friend who introduced me to Doctor Who. When I asked what it was like, he said, 'It's fun – but they just don't have money.' I thought, 'Well, what the hell, I just want to work on it.' And sometimes it can actually be more fun, because you've got to be more creative.' Take the Weeping Angels, those statue-like alien humanoids that are able to send their victims back in time with a simple touch, gorging on the 'time energy' this releases. Producers had initially envisioned using numerous statues, believing that costumed performers painted as statues would resemble street performers too closely. But there was a problem. 'The sheer number of statues required would have been impossible given the timeframe,' says Gorton. 'You would need a different statue for every pose. That would have been a minimum of 30 statues.' Forced to find an alternative, he suggested a design that was part prosthetic, part costume, part body paint. 'The producers thought it was ridiculous. But we literally had no choice!' he says. Gorton would paint the actors, attach fabric, then 'glue it all together and hope for the best'. At that point, he realised how little time he and the team had left to bring the idea to life – just two weeks, compared to the five they would normally have to prepare for an episode. Sadly, this realisation came too late: Gorton had already talked everyone into his idea. The result? 'A total scramble!' They discovered that the masks used to create the Weeping Angels' haunting blank stare left the performers unable to see. Fortunately, this wasn't a huge issue, since the creatures had to remain perfectly still – a feat the team achieved by having the actors sit on a bicycle seat attached to a hidden pole. 'On a bigger budget,' says Gorton, 'you would never go down that road. But given no choice, we just had to be smart and quick about it.' Of course, it isn't just the pressure of budgets and time that lead to human-being-based effects. The Duffer brothers were adamant from the start: the Demogorgon would be portrayed by a performer in a suit. This presented probably the biggest conundrum when it came to designing the creature. 'Its legs are unusually long,' says Sims. 'It has kind of an extra joint. That makes it very challenging for an actor – to be put into stilts and have to run around and jump. The question was, 'How do I keep the design the Duffer brothers love – but make it work for a person in a suit?'' Whatever the challenges and the solutions, Sims finds there is always one benefit of working with flesh-and-blood performers: they ground any design in reality. 'It's important to find things in nature the human eye can identify with,' he says. 'If you take a human thing that's scary, then you add all those things to it, that makes it even more scary.' Asked how he makes monsters such as The Infected so deeply disturbing, Gower makes a similar point: taking everyday things like mushrooms and making them seriously creepy is a guaranteed win. 'Using realistic source material is the key,' he says. 'Keeping things familiar is always going to make them more terrifying. It just gives you goosebumps.' Alien: Earth is on Disney+ from 13 August


Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Jenna Ortega looks quirky in a tiered skirt as she promotes Wednesday in South Korea as season two of the Netflix hit receives rave reviews
Jenna Ortega put on a quirky display at the Wednesday series two press conference in Seoul, South Korea on Monday. The actress, who stars as the titular character in the Netflix hit, wore a gothic tiered skirt for the event which took place at Four Seasons Hotel. She teamed her boucle skirt, which featured a mesh trim and padlock belt, with a zombie printed top. Jenna completed her outfit with a pair of black heels and secured her hair into half-up half-down style. The second series of the supernatural mystery comedy, created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, hit Netflix on August 6 and has received rave reviews from fans. There are a total of eight episodes as part of the latest series, but only four were dropped on the streamer which did leave some viewers disappointed. Jenna Ortega put on a quirky display at the Wednesday series two press conference in Seoul, South Korea on Monday The actress, who stars as the titular character in the Netflix hit, wore a gothic tiered skirt for the event which took place at Four Seasons Hotel Despite receiving an epic Rotten Tomatoes score, fans will have to wait until September 3 to watch the other four episodes. Many shared their complaints on X, writing: 'Only 4 episodes? That's all?'; 'Why just 4 episodes I ain't watching till it's complete'; 'Watching or waiting for all of the episodes on Sep 3?'; 'Only 4 episodes.' That didn't stop fans from giving it a whopping 78% on review website Rotten Tomatoes. Others shared: 'Wednesday season 2 was really f**king good and honestly already better than season 1 but 4 weeks for a batch you gotta be squeezing my balls Netflix.' Daily Mail's Christopher Stevens awarded the series four out of five stars and praised it's superstar cameos. The much-loved series follows the life of Wednesday Addams, who is played by Jenna and originally hit our screens on Netflix back in November 2022. It's based at her boarding school Nevermore Academy, a remote castle where children with magical abilities learn to develop their powers. Some are werewolves, others are gorgons who can turn victims to stone. Wednesday can move objects with her mind and has psychic visions, but that's tame compared to her younger brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez). He can bring the dead to life with a touch. She teamed her boucle skirt, which featured a mesh trim and padlock belt, with a zombie printed top Jenna completed her outfit with a pair of black heels and secured her hair into half-up half-down style The second series of the supernatural mystery comedy, created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, hit Netflix on August 6 and has received rave reviews from fans (L-R Director Tim Burton, Jenna and Emma Myers) Despite receiving an epic Rotten Tomatoes score, fans will have to wait until September 3 to watch the other four episodes - which left some disappointed Daily Mail's Christopher Stevens awarded the series four out of five stars and praised it's superstar cameos (Joanna Lumley pictured) The cast this time includes Steve Buscemi as the school's cheesy, smarmy head teacher, Principal Dort while Billie Piper joins the teaching faculty too, playing a flamboyant music mistress. Christopher says the juiciest cameo goes to Dame Joanna Lumley, Wednesday's grandmama, who has turned the Addams family obsession with the morbid into a career. She's a funeral director – her motto, 'Death never takes a holiday so neither do I.' Also returning is Catherine Zeta-Jones with Isaac Ordonez, Luis Guzmán, Emma Myers, Victor Dorobantu, Joy Sunday, Moosa Mostafa, Georgie Farmer and Hunter Doohan. The official synopsis states: 'Smart, sarcastic and a little dead inside, Wednesday Addams investigates a murder spree while making new friends — and foes — at Nevermore Academy.' Wednesday part one is streaming on Netflix now, while the second follows September third.


Daily Mirror
an hour ago
- Daily Mirror
Netflix fans say 'greatest movie of all time' now available to stream
One of the 'greatest movies of all time' has now become available to watch on Netflix, with viewers saying it's even better than they remember A beloved cinematic masterpiece hailed as a trailblazing movie has just dropped on Netflix, much to the delight of fans. Touted as exceptional and utterly remarkable, the film has garnered a slew of five-star accolades since its debut on the streaming platform. Jurassic Park is celebrated as a 'shining pillar' in crafting a 'summer blockbuster', according to one critic's praise. Another said: "It's not just the dinosaurs that make this film such a fun watch but the cast and the characters as well." Viewers commend the film for withstanding the ravages of time, lauding 'legend' Steven Spielberg and the 'outstanding screenplay' by Michael Crichton and David Koepp, reports the Express. One fan highlighted the ensemble's performances, noting how each actor fit their role 'perfectly', with special mentions for Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, and Wayne Knight. An ardent fan commented on Rotten Tomatoes: "Another ground breaking film created by the legend Steven Spielberg. "Jurassic Park is one of the most fun adventures on film I can think of. Everyone loves dinosaurs; kids and adults alike. "It's not just the dinosaurs that make this film such a fun watch but the cast/characters as well and not to mention that beautiful score. The CGI (computer-generated imagery) still holds up very well today making Jurassic Park a timeless classic." One viewer succinctly hailed Jurassic Park as the ultimate cinematic experience for dino enthusiasts, while others penned extensive tributes to the film. On Rotten Tomatoes, Percy F shared his admiration: "Dino go rawr! The original Jurassic Park is an absolutely incredible film. "From the brilliant direction of Steven Spielberg, and the outstanding screenplay from Michael Crichton and David Koepp, Jurassic Park proves to be a shining pillar of how to make a summer blockbuster. "The performances of everyone in the cast fit their roles perfectly, with stand outs being Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough and Wayne Knight. "The script is impressively thoughtful, with the debate over the morality of bringing back extinct dinosaurs, as well as life's ability to succeed under the most impossible of circumstances. "However, the most outstanding parts of Jurassic Park is without a doubt its blend of practical and special effects, the movie is only as good as its ability to bring the dinosaurs to life, and boy does it. "I can only imagine seeing this movie in theatres in 93, and how mind blowing these effects had to have been for the time - even more impressive is the fact that they still hold up in 2025. "Plus, I always have a soft spot for any movie willing to use practical effects and puppets, but who can blame me. It helps make the dinosaurs feel real!". "The only knock I have against this film is also a piece of additional praise for the film. "Spielberg is a master at crafting suspenseful and exciting action sequences and Jurassic Park fully delivers on that regard. "Unfortunately, the action sequences are occasionally at the expense of real logic, if I'd been suspending my disbelief once or maybe twice, I might be able to justify not taking off half a point. "However, there were three moments throughout the film that forced me into a corner when it came to my suspension of disbelief, thus taking off half a star from what is otherwise a practically flawless film." You can get comfortable for an evening indoors and binge-watch the entire trilogy, as the initial two sequels 'The Lost World: Jurassic Park' and 'Jurassic Park III' are equally accessible for streaming on Netflix.