Movies by year: 1996

(Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to avoid the spoilers to come!)

There were some great films in 1996, a few too many to get into actually. I saw a preview screening of From Dusk Till Dawn, which is two movies mashed together; Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas were terrorized by lions in The Ghost And The Darkness; Fargo took us all by surprise (and made us all avoid Minnesota in the winter); Richard Gere thought he was the star of Primal Fear but we all know it was really Edward Norton's breakout role; and if we didn't already know about the evils of drug addiction, Trainspotting hit us over the head with it with an amazing cast.

But there was one movie that was just more fun than the others:

Mission: Impossible

Ethan Hunt and his crew are on a job, and it goes very badly. VERY badly - everyone's dead and the IMF blame Ethan. So what do you do when everyone thinks you're the bad guy? Well, you don't disappoint.

Ethan spends the rest of the film tracking down the NOC list, running from the IMF, falling for his old boss's wife, and being pretty slick. Tom Cruise was perfectly cast in this, the gadgets are awesome, and the whole acrobatic break-in-to-the-secure-facility scene was - and still is - copied by everyone. Also? Jean Reno.

One of my favourite things about the film: the opening credits. I love how it mirrored the style of the original TV show, with scenes from the upcoming story spliced in. It's the little things, right?

This of course led to a franchise that's still going, and all of them that I've seen so far are excellent. What did you think?