Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (2015) — PICK

Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) — PICK

Amazon Prime subscribers, two of last year’s best films have just been added for your viewing pleasure — one for action fans and one for everybody.

First, the film for everybody. Aardman Animations’ Shaun the Sheep Movie puts a smile on my face before anything even happens. Shaun and his mates are like an antidote to Illumination’s Tater Tot-like Minions: comic animated characters who never utter an intelligible word, yet who trust kids and grown-ups alike to get the joke without hitting them over the head.

Like Shaun’s seven-minute small-screen adventures, there is a playful, warmhearted exuberance to this 85-minute film that is characteristically Aardman. The story — in which the Farmer somehow winds up on the loose in the city, while Shaun, Bitzer the dog and the other sheep search for him — isn’t groundbreaking or anything. But it has been developed with love, with none of the faintly desperate, money-grabbing floundering of Penguins of Madagascar or Minions.

In the end, you feel that you have been among friends, and the world seems a bit brighter. How many movies can you say that about?

Then there’s Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, which, with its predecessor, Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, makes a powerful one-two punch establishing what had been a rather aimless franchise into one of the most exciting series going. 

The opening sequence alone is like a declaration of war; it’s like starting a film with the truck sequence from Raiders, or Ghost Protocol’s Burj Khalifa sequence, as a prologue, instead of a mid-act highlight.

Outdoing its predecessors, Rogue Nation has both a great villain and a great heroine, as well as one great set piece after another, the best of which is probably the Vienna opera-house sequence, set during a performance of Puccini’s Turandot, in which the combatants are at pains to keep their mortal struggle quiet and hidden.

I also appreciate how, in this age of endless franchise “middle movies,” Rogue Nation tells a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end. (Marvel Studios, why can’t you do the same?)