How to Watch the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movies in Order

thewrap.com:

Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, Part One,” the seventh film in the franchise, is due out this July, while “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part Two” will be unleashed next June.

If, somehow, you’ve never seen any of the “Mission: Impossible” movies, they began in 1996 with the Brian De Palma-directed original, an adaptation of the popular, Bruce Geller-created spy series that ran from 1966 to 1973 for 172 episodes and was revived briefly in the late 1980s (that version only ran for two seasons and 35 episodes).

Many of the hallmarks of the television series made it into the movie – the mission briefing that would “self-destruct” at the end of the message, the idea of a team of highly trained specialists, characters like Jim Phelps (played by Jon Voight in the movie and Peter Graves in the original series) – but updated for modern, ‘90s audiences.From there the franchise got a reputation for being director-driven, with each subsequent installment (up until the fifth film) being helmed by a different director.

John Woo brought his Hong Kong bullet ballet aesthetic (and heightened emotional tenor) to “Mission: Impossible 2”; J.J. Abrams made his feature debut with the more grounded and human “Mission: Impossible III”; Brad Bird brought a playfulness and sense of fun to “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”; and Christopher McQuarrie turned “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” into an elevated thriller that bordered on the Hitchcockian, while his followup “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” became even grander, more thrilling and more emotionally resonant.