The one interesting oddity is a snazzy bit of software that instantly crafts a perfect latex mask of Hoffman

The one interesting oddity is a snazzy bit of software that instantly crafts a perfect latex mask of Hoffman. It’s all there: the inconceivably lethal McGuffin, the international settings (“Berlin Germany”, “Rome Italy” and “Shanghai China”, as the captions note with admirable precision), and a vamp (Maggie Q) whose taste in evening wear is, you can’t help feeling, entirely inappropriate for a Vatican drinks reception. Abrams may be famous for bringing surrealism and subsonic rumbles to TV desert-island adventure, but his one formal innovation here is a mildly disorienting pre-credit face-off between Cruise’s masterspy Ethan Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s petulant villain.
Other than that, only the bruisingly frenetic pace distinguishes the film from any other over-budgeted post-Bond knock-off. After respectively dull and vaporous episodes directed by Brian de Palma and John Woo, Mission: Impossible 3 falls into the hands of a TV hack: a de luxe auteur hack perhaps, Lost creator J J Abrams, but on this evidence a hack nonetheless. By contrast, the only thing that seems impossible in the Tom Cruise films is the likelihood of his doing anything without smashing every pane of glass within five miles. What I most resent about the Mission: Impossible films is the criminal waste of a great formula.

Each episode of the original TV series offered tautly executed trompe l’oeil scams, conceived with Rubik-cube logic, executed with the finesse of Bobby Fischer and Fred Astaire combined, and filmed with a crystalline rigour befitting Robert Bresson. It coats a harrowing, austere film with a veneer of kitsch; or then again, who knows, perhaps it helps us watch what might otherwise have been intolerable.j.romney independent.co.uk. The one terrible mistake is a syrupy score by Ennio Morricone, which Roberto Benigni would have hesitated to use in Life is Beautiful. It’s also rare among its genre in successfully eschewing all traces of sentiment and in acknowledging the place of anger as a response to the Holocaust experience. Fateless is at once minutely realistic and as stylised as nightmare: a restricted palette of faded blues and greys depicts the camp universe as a polar hell, sunless and metallic (although, as Gyula puts it with awful precision, “Hell doesn’t exist: the camps do.”).Of all fiction films I’ve seen about the camps, Fateless is the most specifically and painfully evocative of the day-to-day realities of hunger, fatigue, cold and wet.

Yet the extremely tactile nature of the images makes it far harder for us to distance ourselves from the film’s world than from, say, that of Schindler’s List or the ghetto of Polanski’s The Pianist, which felt safely distant by virtue of their archive-photo hyper-realism. Fateless is in no way diluted by the fact that many of its most powerful moments come from the classic iconography of Holocaust horror, like the row of stacked suitcases left by an empty train, or (the film’s most disturbing and, I fear, unforgettable sequence) a panorama of prisoners in their striped uniforms, swaying uncontrollably in their ranks with sickness and fatigue.
Koltai and his director of photography, Gyula Pados, at times make Fateless unnervingly beautiful, which might raise some suspicions of the film’s integrity. The awful recognition of reality by Gyuri and his friends comes in a devastating cut (much of the film’s subtle power comes from its laconic fades to black) from a bespectacled young boy looking hopefully up at an SS officer, to his friends, heads now shaven, discussing his absence and their own likely fates. “We should have studied nothing but Auschwitz,” one says, with devastating lucidity. But Gyuri, pulled off a bus by a gratuitously malevolent policeman, ends up in Auschwitz, Birkenau and Buchenwald. Those around him are either doggedly accepting their fate and, against all hope, trusting in a merciful outcome; or denying the increasingly terrible evidence of the rumours from Poland. Adapted from his autobiographical novel by Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, Fateless begins in Forties Budapest, where 14-year-old Jewish boy Gyuri Koves (impressively resilient newcomer Marcell Nagy, inset) is wearing his yellow star with blithe teenage defiance.