Pictureland

B-A-B-Y-DRI-VER!  Edgar Wright's sixth film has arrived in the summer of 2017 with all the insistence and irresistibility of a great pop song.  Already in his splashy career the Englishman has written better tunes than this. And yet Baby Driver pulses with more precision and originality of expression than most of his contemporaries can approach at their best.   Resist if you dare.  As summer fare goes, fast, furious and not lobotomized is hard to pass up. Wright has apparently had the notion for Baby Driver bouncing around in that energetic mind of his since the 1990s.  You can see a version of the film's first scene in a music video for Mint Royale's "Blue Song" Wright directed in 2003.  The super kinetic action is certainly a perfect fit for the writer/director's crisp editing, wit and inimitable unison of sound and action. Baby Driver both charges from the start line and yet saves it feeling for character and emotion for a bit later. ...

England, England.  Land of zombies, land of murderous village beautiful crackpots and home, at least in one small town, to alien robots.  So it goes in dear old Blighty through the installments of Edgard Wright's so-called Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy.  The name is, obviously enough, a play on Kieslowski's slightly more serious film trilogy.  During the publicity for Hot Fuzz , someone apparently pointed out to Wright that Cornetto ice cream had made an appearance in both that film and the prior Sean of the Dead.  The ice cream has a cameo in World's End as well.  And if you're into this sort of thing, there's a color coding (if retroactively applied to the earlier films) to the Cornetto in each film to match the theme, or at least the mayhem. But we're not here to talk about ice cream.  The end of the world is the case, both the the apocalyptic event and a pub of the same evocative name.  Both, as it happens in the film directed by M...