By Dustin Rowles | Film | July 14, 2017 |
By Dustin Rowles | Film | July 14, 2017 |
5. Baby Driver — I can’t stress enough just how wildly fun Baby Driver is. It’s the most crowd-pleasing movie of 2017, a soaring, zig-zagging, viscerally exciting, crackling crime caper with a lot of soul, an impeccable soundtrack, and personality that goes on for days. It’s the best movie of Edgar Wright’s career, the Channing Tatum Fucking the Floor in Magic Mike of Heist Movies. If you need more convincing, here’s the film’s first six minutes — Youtube doesn’t do it the justice that a big screen does, but it’s still great fun to watch on your mobile phone. — DR
4. Wonder Woman — Director Patty Jenkins isn’t trying to make a movie that will upset the superhero mold. She’s making the movie that should have been decades ago, before origin story fatigue set in and studios started taking the “but what if grimdark?” approach to superhero staples like Batman and Superman. (For the record, Wonder Woman has its dark moments—hi, it’s set during World War I—but it’s much lighter in tone than BvS.) If anyone deserves an epic, big-budget “This is how this awesome person got awesome. BASK IN IT.” spectacle, it’s Diana Prince. And Jenkins treats her with the goddamn respect she goddamn deserves. —RP
2. Logan — Logan may well be the best of all of the X-Men movies to-date. It’s certainly the most elegantly executed. Taking the character almost entirely out of its most recent adventures works very much in its favor, and Mangold deftly and beautifully captures the beauty and violence and complexity of its characters and their various struggles. It’s a deeply intimate film, peppered with some gasp-inducing violence, capturing all of the best parts of one of our most memorable characters. If this is to be Hugh Jackman’s final performance as Logan, it’s good to see that he saved the best for last. — TK