Alexis Bloom‘s Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes is a frightshow. It leaves you with a shudder and a realization that Ailes, drooling fiend that he may well have been, really was a Luciferian visionary and a dark genius who turned Red America into a Nation of Crazy.

He was the reigning Machiavellian author of big-lie rightwing media for 20 years, the Pied Piper of Rural Dumbshit-ism, the pugnacious fat man who primed the country for the arrival of Donald Trump…a hustler who dipped his paintbrush into an apothecary jar of his own fears and paranoia (and perhaps some festering resentment toward his mother for infecting him with hemophilia as a young child) and embraced anger and aggression as primal fuel and sticking it to the liberal media machine as his guiding mission.

How engrossing is Divide and Conquer? Very. How detailed, probing and well-organized? Same. How depressing is it? Oddly, it’s strangely engrossing because Ailes was a real surface-to-air missile and a deranged motherfucker whose generator was always humming. He was never a dull man, and neither is this documentary. How much does it tell you that you didn’t know? Not that much but I didn’t care. What a demonic and diseased reptile Ailes was…a cookie filled with arsenic.

I didn’t hate The Meg, but I didn’t believe a second of it. But then you’re not supposed to.

Everyone knew that Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws was just a scary summer movie, but audiences were nonetheless persuaded that what they were seeing could be half-real. Spielberg did everything he could to make it suspenseful and flavor it up, throwing in clever tricks and diversions and making at least some of it stick to the ribs.

Meg director Jon Turtletaub has no such inclination. His weightless, stone-skimming film is part put-on, partly a Jaws competition piece and partly a $150 million theme-park jizzathon. It’s assembled like an early ’50s MGM musical, the shark encounters being the musical numbers, of course, and the dialogue scenes providing the usual connective filler.

I didn’t seethe and twitch as I sometimes do during bad movies. I sat there and guffawed from time to time, which I guess is a good sign.

The Meg definitely isn’t scary. It’s too dopey for that. It’s all about wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank…”we have your admission and candy money…we don’t care so why should you?…eh, that wasn’t too bad…that one half-worked, the other one didn’t…please have all fat guys get eaten by the Meg…oh, look, a fat 12 year old kid…can the Meg eat him too? O joy and rapture!”

Every single guy with even a slight weight problem in this film becomes Meg food, or so I recall. Does Page Kennedy get eaten? I think so but I’m not 100% sure. I was zoning out during the last third — i.e., awake but glazed over.

Three Hollywood Elsewhere rules for shark movies: (1) Feel free to kill off fat guys and all fathers and secondary characters, but (2) no feeding women to the shark or you’ll have the MeToo! movement on your ass, and (3) never kill off an entertaining character who has a sharp-tongued, irreverent attitude thing going on.

You don’t want to hear about the plot or the set-up, which is all hand-me-down, by-the-numbers crap.

Jason Statham is the studly tough guy who has an early traumatic run-in with the Megalodon, a 75-foot-long prehistoric shark, in a kind of Octopus’s Garden in the Phillipine trench. An underwater research facility funded by a mildly overweight billionaire nerd (Rainn Wilson) with fairly atrocious taste in footwear. Oceanographers exploring a hidden ecosystem in the trench, blah blah, but the Meg tries to eat a submersible piloted by Statham’s ex-wife (Jessica McNamee) blah blah. There’s also a fetching marine biologist (Li Bingbing) who quickly develops the hots for Statham. Her oceanographer father (Winston Chao) is bland boredom personfied.

There are maybe five or six “musical numbers” during the first two acts (whew, that was close, almost got eaten!). In act three the Meg decides to chow down on a crowded swimming area a la Jaws….hors d’oeuvres! And then the big finale in which Statham singlehandedly dominates and defeats.

There are lots of homages to other water-logged films. There’s a scene in which a giant squid wraps itself around a submersible a la 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. There’s a “reviving an apparently drowned pretty woman” scene a la The Abyss. There’s a scene with a little flop-eared white poodle called Pippin getting eaten, just like another dog named Pippin got eaten in Spielberg’s film. There’s a cable-drag scene out of Jaws. At one point Statham mounts and rides the Megalodon like Gregory Peck‘s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (’56), and there’s even a close-up shot of the Meg’s eye looking right at Statham — an exact copy of Moby Dick doing the same with Peck.

Earlier today I saw Dennis Hopper‘s The Last Movie at the Metrograph. The first third is half-interesting so I’m not sorry I saw it, but it’s mostly a sloppy mess, and that’s entirely on Hopper — the director, editor and star. The middle portion and final third are boring for the most part, and at times repellent. I read somewhere that Stewart Stern‘s original screenplay told an actual story that made sense, but the way it’s been cut together is lazy and haphazard; at times it almost feels spazzy. The film is interesting here and there (I liked the “SCENE MISSING” inserts and the fact that the main-title card doesn’t appear until 20 minutes in) but there’s no tension in any of it.

And Hopper’s lead character, a stunt coordinator named Kansas, is just an ass. A weak, squishy, impulsive jellyfish whom you half-tolerate at first, and then you grow to vaguely dislike and then hate him by the end of the first hour. He doesn’t die soon enough.

The Last Movie is set in a Peruvian village (actually a small town named Chinchero) in the Andes foothills. It’s about a Sam Fuller-directed western shooting there, and some guy dying in a stunt accident and Kansas, who seems like a reasonably decent fellow at first, deciding to stay in the village when the film wraps. He hooks up with Maria (Stella Garcia), an attractive, good-hearted woman who may or may not be a prostitute.

Kansas gradually turns into a weasel, breaking poor Maria’s heart by coming on to another woman (Julie Adams, best known for The Creature From The Black Lagoon) in her presence.

Then what happens? Kansas gets worried about running out of funds (this didn’t occur to him when he decided to stay on?) and decides to invest $500 in a sketchy goldmine scheme that quickly goes south. And then some of the native Chincherans — this is the really stupid part — decide to start making their own imaginary film with pretend cameras and microphone booms made of wood, except they don’t understand play-acting and start engaging in real violence. And Kansas gets caught in the wringer.

The primitive-natives thing is patronizing. The locals aren’t some tribe of spear-throwing jungle dwellers but small-town guys who wear boots and jeans and use telephones and order drinks in bars, and yet the movie tells us they’re as clueless and cut off from 20th Century civilization as New Guinea cannibals. A crap premise. Maria is from the same town, remember, and she seems as attuned to the complexities of modern life as anyone. If you don’t buy the idea that the natives are unable to understand the concept of acting and pretending, The Last Movie collapses like a house of cards.

The best part of The Last Movie is the first-act footage of Michelle Phillips, who was around 26 when the film was shot in 1970 and really, really beautiful. My whole mood brightened when I saw her. She married Hopper not long after The Last Movie wrapped, but they got divorced after only eight days. (Married on 10.31.70, divorced on 11.8.70.)

Michelle Phillips during filming of The Last Movie.

Bo Burnham‘s Eighth Grade (A24, 7.13) deserves all the praise it’s been getting. It’s one of the most intimate, penetrating, real-deal capturings of the dull terror of being 13 years old and more particularly an eighth-grader…God, what a horrible realm to be stuck in.

I suffered through it like everyone else, anxious and unsettled and sullen as fuck, loathing the unceasing social and scholastic demands, hating the jocks and the hot girls who hung with them after school, having to feign interest in algebra and science and suffer the soul-stifling penalty of homework every night and especially despising my pimply complexion, living in a kind of suburban concentration camp and dying for the release of TV, movies and music…anything to escape the horror and just miserable all around.

Things are obviously different for poor Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher, who played Kevin Costner‘s adolescent daughter Jamie in Niki Caro‘s McFarland, USA) but the same drill applies. On top of which she’s quiet and chubby (the word is actually fat) and acne-scarred, and yet reasonably assertive as far as posting a video diary and attending this and that social gathering, painful and awkward as they prove to be. (Thanks in no small part to a pair of cruel bitches who reject Kayla’s offers of friendship.) And sexually curious and intimidated, of course, but with sufficient amounts of smarts and self-respect that keep her from just going along when sexual invitations are offered. She’s no dummy and no pushover, but God, the misery of her condition.

On top of which Kayla’s single dad, Mark (Josh Hamilton), is caring and gentle and yet astonishingly self-absorbed. Everything he says to her is “will you pay more attention to me?…I worship and love you so much but I wish you would talk to me more…oh Kayla, you’re so very beautiful and special but you won’t let me in…could you possibly change your mind about that?” Asshole! He doesn’t remember despising almost everything about his parents at this age? He doesn’t remember that all you want is to be left alone so you can suffer in your own stew?

When she wants to talk to you, Mark, she will. Just keep paying the mortgage and putting food on the table. The rest will sort itself out.

Before beginning their careers casting directors are required to swear an oath to never hire actors who even vaguely resemble each other when casting parents and children. Moviegoers understand this ridiculous system, of course, and have therefore stopped caring when an actor playing a dad doesn’t even look like he could even be the cousin of the boy or girl he’s playing the parent of. The large-eyed Fisher is moon-faced and sort of Norwegian-looking in a farmer’s daughter sense, and a good 15 or 20 pounds overweight. Hamilton’s face is narrow with smallish, WASPY eyes, and he’s apparently careful about what he eats. Forget family resemblance — these two are from different planets. And yet we’re stuck with them as father and daughter, and having to make it all feed together in our heads.

And yet Fisher is very, very good, which is to say painful to watch. You’re sitting there going “this poor girl…she’s going to have to suffer for another two or three years and perhaps longer, depending on how it goes…she has no choice but to bear the burden.” Your heart goes out but Jesus.

I’ve just come out of an opening-night Cannes Film Festival screening (not the big whoop-dee-doo one in the Grand Lumiere but a concurrent press screening in the Salle Debussy) of Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows. It’s not a bust but by Farhadi’s lofty standards it’s something of a shortfaller, particularly due to how the third act unfolds.

But it’s still a Farhadi film, and that always means a character-rich, complexly plotted, proceeding-at-its-own-pace family-community drama — smartly written, always well acted — in which deeper and deeper layers of the onion are gradually peeled until the truth comes out.

Set in rural Spain, it’s about the sudden disappearance of a character but it’s not an About Elly-level thing. At all. It’s actually about a kidnapping but that’s all I’m going to divulge. But Everybody Knows follows the Farhadi form by focusing on a large community of family members, friends, co-workers (i.e., a wine farm) and whatnot, and everyone, we soon realize, knows everyone else’s secrets. Well, most of them. And by the end, everything comes out in the wash.

But the story and especially the ending don’t echo all that much in a social-fabric or social-portraiture sense. All you get from it is “people are more selfish and prideful and less compassionate than they let on,” but you knew that going in. It tells a tale about some bad business, and it stays on that level to the end. It doesn’t expand or begin to play a bigger game.

When the closing credits began to roll only five or six people clapped, and half-heartedly at that.

Something is wrong when a portion of an audience laughs at a plot revelation, which happened tonight during the third act or around 100 minutes in. There’s nothing clumsy or attitudinally funny about the “new information”, so to speak, but several journalists inside the Salle Debussy guffawed rather loudly when Penelope Cruz said a particular line.

I almost turned around and sneered because the revelation is something that’s built into the buried-family-secrets plot — you can smell it coming a mile away. Why 10 or 15 journos chortled out loud is beyond me. It’s an awkward moment dramatically, I’ll admit, but it’s not a crazy thing to throw into a drama of this sort. It’s like a third-act “surprise” out of a gothic romance novel, but it fits right into the fabric and scheme of the story.

Having heard over the last couple of days that Everybody Knows underwhelms or is some kind of “meh” thing, I went in expecting a problem movie or even one that goes thud. But it’s not that bad and is actually pretty good all the way through until the last 15 or 20. I would even say first-rate for the most part, but it does get into trouble in the third act.

The finale is okay, but it doesn’t feel complete or fulfilling enough. All the loose ends are tied up for the most part, but it doesn’t quite get there.

Sebastian Lelio‘s Disobedience (Bleecker, 4.27) was one of my more satisfying viewings at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’s a classy, heartfelt hot-lesbo thing. That makes it sound a bit tawdry, I realize, but that’s the hook and the filmmakers knew that going in.

Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is a British-born Jew living a louche life in Manhattan. She returns to England when her Rabbi father passes away, and gradually reconnects with Esti (Rachel McAdams), a former lover who’s now married to an Orthodox Rabbi (Allesandro Nivola). Needless to add, Ronit and Esti get into it again.

I regret to say that my only Toronto-based comment about Disobedience was that it’s “so well-made and full of feeling that I’m not even going to use the phrase ‘hot lesbo action,’ although it does have that.”

This morning Jordan Ruimy and I caught Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals, an imaginative, altogether excellent film about an unusual ’80s boyhood in Upstate New York. We had decided to attend this morning largely due to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn having called it “this year’s Moonlight.”

Before the film began I briefly spoke to Cinetic’s John Sloss. He said that the Moonlight analogy had set the bar too high. But when it was over I was persuaded that We, The Animals, based on a 2012 Justin Torres novel, is trippier and more affecting than Moonlight ever dreamed of, and in a way that recalls Beasts of the Southern Wild with a little Tree of Life mixed in.

I re-read Kohn’s review as I was leaving the theatre, and I felt a little irked about his emphasizing the gay aspect. “As with Moonlight, Zagar taps into a cinematic toolbox for representing an outsider’s struggles,” Kohn wrote, “particularly as it pertains to a developing queerness within the confines of a world in which marginalization is baked into everyday life.”

My email to Kohn: “The analogy is not Moonlight, Eric, but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes.

“The gay factor is incidental, almost negligible. Same-sex boners are not the thing here. It’s the levitation, the book of drawings, the careful editing, the apartness, the challenges faced by a ‘different’, artistic kid…the Malick of it all.”

This is easily the best film of Sundance ‘18 along with Lynne Ramsay’s plus those four docs I like (Ashby, Fonda, Williams, Studio 54).

Sundance boilerplate: “With a screenplay by Dan Kitrosser and Jeremiah Zagar, We, The Animals is a visceral coming-of-age story propelled by strikingly layered performances from its astounding cast, elements of magical realism and unbelievable animated sequences.”

The ironclad rule about gaining entrance to the original Studio 54 (i.e., Schrager-Rubell, April ’77 to the ’80 shutdown over tax evasion) was that you had to not only look good but dress well. That meant Giorgio Armani small-collared shirts if possible and certainly not being a bridge-and-tunnel guinea with polyester garb and Tony Manero hair stylings.

As I watched Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 I was waiting for someone to just say it, to just say that Saturday Night Fever borough types weren’t even considered because they just didn’t get it, mainly because of their dress sense but also because their plebian attitudes and mindsets were just as hopeless.

It finally happens at the half-hour mark. One of the door guys (possibly Marc Benecke) says “no, the bridge-and-tunnel people never got in“…never.” I can’t tell you how comforting it was to hear that again after so many years.

Another thing: Bob Calacello or somebody mentions how Studio 54 happened in a glorious period in American culture that was post-birth control and pre-AIDS. The film explains how liberal sexual attitudes were particularly celebrated by urban gay culture, which was just starting to sample freedoms that today are more or less taken for granted. Guys couldn’t hold hands on the street but they certainly could once they got inside Studio 54.

But one thing you can’t say in today’s climate (and which Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t even mention in passing) is that the ’70s were also a glorious nookie era for heterosexual guys. It was probably the most impulsive, heavily sensual, Caligula-like period (especially with the liberal use of quaaludes) to happen in straight-person circles since…you tell me. The days of Imperial Rome?

This kind of thing is now a verboten topic, of course, with the 2018 narrative mainly being about how guys need to forget “impulsive” and turn it down and be extra super careful in approaching women in any context. But things were quite different back in the Jimmy Carter era. I’m not expressing any particular nostalgia for those days, but the new Calvinism of 2018 couldn’t be farther away from what the social-sexual norms were 40 years ago. Just saying.

I wouldn’t describe myself as head-over-heels in love with Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight, 12.8) but I certainly approve and then some.

A sweet Guillermo fable through and through, I agree 100% that it’s definitely his best film since Pan’s Labyrinth — one of his smaller-scale creations that aims above and beyond the fanboy realm. Shape is a sci-fi period thing, a trans-species love story, a swoony romantic fantasy and an E.T.-like tale about a merging of disparate hearts and souls.

It also accommodates a darkly paranoid story about the forces of absolute badness looking to dissect and destroy an exotic life form. It’s a little stiff and overbearing at times, but generally mature and tender-hearted and ten times better than Okja, which used a similar storyline.

Sally Hawkins in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water.

This is an adult fantasy piece full of heartache and swoony feelings, lusciously and exactingly composed, painted with early ’60s period detail and production design to die for. A movie completely dominated and in fact saturated with its Guillermo-ness.

I saw Shape late last night. The screening began at 11:20 pm and ended two hours later, and I was 100% alert and wide-eyed start to finish. This is what good movies do — they wake you up and keep you in a state of anticipation until the closing credits. Oh, and the headline I went with three days ago after the first Venice showing — Douglas Sirk’s Creature From The Love Lagoon — still stands.

Set in 1962 Baltimore, The Shape of Water is about a current that quickly develops between Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute and lonely but sensually attuned dreamer who works as a cleaning woman inside a government-run scientific laboratory, and a gentle, large-eyed aqua-creature with God-like healing powers (Doug Jones) who’s recently been captured in South America and brought to the lab for study and eventual dissection.

There are serious obstructions to their love affair, of course, but you knew that going in.

I saw Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky (Bleecker Street 8.18) this morning, and I came out fairly happy or soothed or whatever. I wasn’t exactly dazzled or blown away but I don’t think was the intention. It’s a mild, easygoing entertainment. Yes, it’s Ocean’s Eleven in a rural, lower-middle-class realm, except the principal thieves (Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig) are unassumingly brilliant in both the planning and execution of a big heist, or the removing of millions from Charlotte Motor Speedway.

So far most critics are delighted with Logan Lucky. It has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak, and an 81% rating from Metacritic. But what about Joe and Jane Popcorn, not to mention rural shitkicker types?

Soderbergh is such a master, such an exacting orchestrator. This has been said repeatedly about many films, but Logan Lucky has really and truly been assembled like a fine Swiss watch. I really love hanging in Soderberghland. I relish his dry sense of humor, his laid-back naturalism and low-key way of shooting stuff, plus his cool framings and cutting style, etc. A total pro.

I’m too stupid to understand all the logistical and strategic maneuvers, double-backs and fake-outs. To this day I don’t entirely understand every last thing about how the heist was pulled off in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, and I don’t care enough to see it again anyway. I’m just not very smart when it comes to this stuff.

Part of the problem today was that I was unable to hear about 35% or 40% of the dialogue because of the horrible sound system in the Wilshire Screening Room.

But I loved so much about Logan Lucky. I really did. It’s such a nicely assembled alternate-reality caper piece. It’s a light cultural fantasy thing, and is quite funny here and there. Very droll and low-key and plain spoken. But I mainly love it because it’s so well made. All hail cinematographer Peter Andrews!

And yeah, I loved the surprise appearance of Hillary Swank, but I’m too dumb to…forget it.

Of course, Logan Lucky is set in a version of Bumblefuckland that’s not quite real. Because the characters aren’t real Bumblefucks but Hollywood hybrids pretending to be the Real McCoy. Skilled, clever, laid-back smoothies performing with yokel accents and wearing the clothing and all the rest of it in a casual, pocket-drop way, and at the same time handling their complex robbery scheme in a much smarter way than you might expect garden-variety Bumblefucks to do, or anyone for that matter who isn’t an Einstein-level genius at pulling off robberies.

George Clooney‘s Danny Ocean would be seriously impressed by these guys.

Last Tuesday (7.25) I expressed interest in Mike White‘s Brad’s Status (Amazon/Annapurna, 9.15). The trailer suggested it would be a smart, bone-dry father-son comedy about an insecure, middle-aged dad (Ben Stiller) who’s more than a bit haunted by career underachievement and, worse, by the dawning success of his son (20-year-old Austin Abrams).

My first reaction was “aah, this’ll be good and I wanna see it, but is Stiller playing the same kind of anxious, insecure 40ish guy he was in Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young? If so, should he be doing another so soon?”

Well, the trailer misled. Okay, Stiller’s character slightly resembles the vaguely terrified would-be hipster he played in that 2014 Noah Baumbach film, but Brad Sloan, the nonprofit counselor he plays in White’s new film, is a different kind of bird. A Sacramento guy who’s constantly in the grip of suppressed envy and twitches of self-disappointment, but who never descends into foolery or self-mocking caricature. Far from rich and no one’s idea of assured or super-confident, but an honest, moderately mannered fellow who can’t help….well, frowning at the mirror. At times. But doing his best to cover this up.

I saw Brad’s Status last night, and I think it’s really exceptional. It’s basically a smallish dramedy about Brad taking son Troy to Boston to check out some colleges. It begins as another Stiller humiliation piece, but it turns into one of the best mid-level adult dramas of this type in a long, long time, and a truly exceptional (which is to say very wise) generation-gap flick.

I wasn’t expecting that much at first, but about a half-hour in I began to realize that White’s film is a winning meditation about self-worth, self-image, self-assessment, real vs. imagined happiness and empty envy. It’s honest and real and very, very well written. Fleet, subtle, unforced. Fairly complex but evened out by the end.

Brad Sloan is easily Stiller’s best-written role and finest performance since Greenberg, but with a more appealing (if ambiguous) tone. More solemn and self-aware. Not stalled or self-destructive but forlorn and nearly resigned.

Brad’s Status is a character-inspection thing that cuts it right down the middle, on one hand making Stiller’s character seem overly envious or even a bit pathetic, and on the other giving him a certain degree of self-awareness and dignity and grace in the third act. It’s a quiet adult movie in the best sense of that term. It lets you sort it out, choose sides, figure the angles.

If Woody Allen had directed and written this it would be much more on the nose, or it would feel first-drafty. This is easily White’s best script since School of Rock, and his direction is just so. He balances the ingredients just right. I adore the way he doesn’t come down on one side or the other of any given issue or dispute. And I love that White himself is 47, right along with Brad.

Brad’s envy is focused on three college friends who went on to become rich and super-successful — Michael Sheen‘s Craig Fisher (a best-selling author), Luke Wilson‘s Jason Hatfield (a hedge fund guy) and Jemaine Clement‘s Billy Wearsiter (a now-retired playboy).

Without giving too much away there are a couple of payoff scenes in which Wilson and especially Sheen interact with Stiller. One of the brilliant aspects of White’s script is that he doesn’t precisely tell you that this or that guy is a complete dick, or that Stiller is better or worse than either one. He just lets you listen and consider.

And there’s a great score by Mark Mothersbaugh.  And Stiller has an emotional scene during a third-act concert scene that really works, I think. I believed it, at least. I’ve been there, felt that.

And Austin Abrams is really great. He’s a brilliant under-player. I believed his every word and gesture. He looks and half-sounds like Bob Dylan might’ve sounded when he was 20 or 21.

Yes, Brad’s Status is heavily narrated. Voice-over explanations and fill-ins sometimes rub me the wrong way, but this time it works, partly, I suppose, because Stiller’s Brad is a thoughtful ex-journalist who knows how to explain things well, and so his narrative commentary (which is very well phrased) fits right in.

“Hey, Dad…are you having some kind of nervous breakdown or something?”

Most of Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver (TriStar, 6.28) is inspired — one of the most strikingly conceived, purely enjoyable fast-car crime flicks I’ve ever seen. With Ansel Elgort as a Ryan Gosling-level getaway driver who needs the right kind of song playing in his ear buds in order to make it all come together, Baby Driver is essentially a kind of action musical — cray-cray car chases and ferocious gunplay synchronized with the sounds and vice versa. To some extent it reminded me of Drive, and at times of Thief, Gone In Sixty Seconds, Bullitt….that line of country.

The four or five car chases in the film are exhilarating nutso stuff, but at the same time the action is undisciplined and show-offy and actually quite mad — Wright going for the gusto without regard to probability or (that horrid word) reality, but at the same time delivering the best squealing-rubber thrills since Gosling and Nicholas Winding Refn pooled forces, and absolutely leaving the bullshit fantasy realm of the Furious franchise in the dust.

But then Wright decides to send Baby Driver flying off the freeway around…oh, the 90-minute mark. And the last 15 or so minutes are flat-out insane and then infuriating. I was sitting there with my face contorted as I silently screamed, “What the fuck are you doing?…you fucking asshole! You really had something going there, but now you’re ruining the movie…you’re making it into some kind of bullshit Vin Diesel cum milkshake with a pop-fantasy ending made of dingleberries and drooling saliva. Why? Do you have a creative death wish?”

HE to director friend this morning: “I just saw Baby Driver last night….a wowser, near-great action musical for the first 80% or 85% followed by a ridiculously absurd, overly violent, catastrophically stupid finale that all but destroys the current and the vibe. A friend said ‘the wheels come off at the end‘ but they come off because Wright got under the car and loosened the lug nuts. Rarely have I seen a popcorn film as inspired and well-made as Baby Driver just blow itself up and shatter into pieces at the very end…a shame and a tragedy.”

I am nonetheless recommending Baby Driver for those first 90 or so minutes. But at the same time I’m telling you that any critic who’s written a gushing pass without mentioning that it destroys itself over the last 15 minutes or so…anyone who ignores this DEAD OBVIOUS FACT is a lying, jizz-whizzing whore who can never be fully trusted ever again.