‘BABY DRIVER’ — Edgar Wright can direct action – and use it to define character- like nobody’s business. And the Shaun of the Dead filmmaker pulls out all the stops here in this tale of Baby, a getaway driver with hearing issues that he resolves by plugging in his earbuds and creating a soundtrack in his head. Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx and a dynamite Jon Hamm are nutjob bad guys to die for. Lily James is the sweet object of Baby’s sweetest dreams. And the delirious car stunts redefine dazzling. You may think that Baby Driver is much too much fun to be a great movie. You’d be wrong. ‘GET OUT’ –a horror movie in the top position, you say? You bet. Making his directorial debut, Jordan Peele uses the genre as a springboard to comment on race in America with the scathing wit and pointed provocation that Op-Ed pages only wish they had. Girls’ Allison Williams is the suburban white girl who brings home her black boyfriend Daniel Kaluuya in a beautifully sick twist on ‘Meet the Parents’. Peele, working from his own script, packs so much film history and savvy technique into his first go behind the camera that he gets my vote right now as the year’s best new filmmaker. ‘LOGAN’ — in his 10th and final go at the most popular of X-men, Hugh Jackman delivers the performance of his life, finding the bruised soul of the character in a way that he never has before. Director/co-writer James Mangold zaps the film into the future with our claw-sprouting hero brought low by booze and the passage of time. He cares for his mutant mentor Charles Xavier, who is battling brain seizures and a doubtful future until both face the ultimate in violent, R-rated challenges. Oscar attention must be paid to both Jackman and Stewart, who rage against the dying of the light with grit and amazing grace. ‘THE BIG SICK’ — if Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V Gordon don’t get Oscar attention for the brilliant screenplay they carved out of their own hilarious relationship, then the Academy knows nothing. The stand-up comic stars as Kumail, a Pakistani stand-up comic still tied to his old-world heritage and his Muslim family’s old-school thinking about arranged marriage. The unerringly wonderful Zoe Kazan plays Emily, the North Carolina therapist-in training who turns his world upside down. Then she gets sick, and beaucoup tears trade off with belly-laughs. Directed by Michael Showalter, ‘The Big Sick’ is more than just the coma comedy of the year – it’s totally irresistible. ‘THE LOST CITY OF Z’ — the filmmaker is at his most visionary and haunting in this true story, adapted from the 2009 non-fiction book by David Gann, of Colonel Percy Fawcett, a British officer who risked ridicule by exploring the Amazon jungle for a lost civilisation. For Fawcett and for Gray, it’s less about whether or not his quest was nothing more than a fatalistic folly – it’s the exploration that counts. Published in Daily Times, June 29th, 2017.