(c) 2011 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

1. What’s it about?

The movie opens to secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in a Russian prison, having taken the fall for the unsanctioned killing of some Serbian soldiers (after which the U.S. government disavowed the existence of his mission). Hunt is broken out by Benji of his old team (Simon Pegg) and Jane, a new team member (Paula Patton). He is given a secret mission by the Secretary of Defense: to stop the transfer of nuclear launch codes to a madman who would happily reduce the earth to nuclear dust. Hunt teams up with Jane, Benji and...

When an F-22 Raptor malfunctioned in mid-flight, leading to a crash that killed its pilot, the Air Force went into damage-control mode. Gen. Norton Schwartz, the chief of staff, insisted there was no way that the oxygen generator on his prized stealth jet — a system widely suspected of being dangerously flawed — caused the crash. And even now that an internal inquiry seems to contradict Schwartz, the Air Force is still blaming Capt. Jeffrey Haney for the crash that cost Haney his life.

The most important discovery in the Air Force’s official report on the Nov. 10, 2010 accident in Alaska: The...