Mission: Impossible

Mission: Impossible (1996) is a spy thriller directed by Brian De Palma — watch it online on iFILM. Tom Cruise stars as CIA field agent Ethan Hunt, whose cover operation in Prague goes catastrophically wrong: the whole team is dead within minutes.

Hunt survives. That immediately makes him the prime suspect. His own handlers believe he's the mole who burned the agents. To clear his name, he does the one thing that seems flatly insane — steal the classified NOC list from a hardened CIA vault in Langley. Jean Reno and Ving Rhames join him on the inside; Jon Voight plays seasoned operative Jim Phelps. Screenwriters Robert Towne and David Koepp buried a twist in the final act that flipped expectations built by two decades of the original TV show.

De Palma shot the film as a near-claustrophobic puzzle thriller — less action set piece, more con game with lethal stakes. Danny Elfman's score weaves in Lalo Schifrin's iconic 1966 theme without drowning it. Three decades and eight films later, the wire-drop over the laser grid is still the image that defines the whole franchise. Stream Mission: Impossible (1996) online on iFILM.