The Best Movies Of Summer 2017

“Baby Driver”
Edgar Wright consulted with “Mad Max: Fury Road” director George Miller, the master of practical effects, for help on his car-chase movie “Baby Driver.” That tells you everything you need to know about the detail that went into making this tale of hot-rod heaven. The stunts in “Baby Driver” are INSANE. Wright filmed all of the action sequences on location, and what was on screen was 95% practical effects, with only 5% CGI for touch-ups. Because they shot in a city and working freeway, they had to rehearse on the Atlanta Motor Speedway and choreograph with Matchbox cars. The film tells the story of a talented, young getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) who’s forced to work on a heist for a crime boss (Kevin Spacey) and two for-hire crooks (Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm). The film is a candy-colored mash-up of “Drive,” The Driver” and Michael Mann’s “Thief.”

“War For the Planet of the Apes”
What Matt Reeves has done in “War For the Planet of the Apes” is quite an accomplishment. The third, and presumably final, chapter in the ‘Apes’ series is one of the most entertaining movies of the year. The miraculous thing about it is that it barely has any dialogue. Sure, there are lines uttered here and there, but the fact that 99% of the apes can’t speak and the main human character, a teenage girl, is deaf, results in a film that relies heavily on visuals to tell its story. There’s no excess fat here, just pure unadulterated thrills that rely on the audience’s smarts to pull through. This is action, gloriously displayed on an epic scale, with a thrilling and groundbreaking blend of CGI and kinesthesism, especially in its breathtaking finale. Reeves has found a way to bring back expressionism and make “silent cinema” hip again this summer. Who’d a thunk it?

“Good Time”
A botched bank robbery starts off the madcap lunacy of the Safdie Brothers’ “Good Time.” Constantine Nikas’ (Robert Pattinson) brother lands in jail and, to try and find bail money, he embarks on the darkest and most surreal of Odysseys in New York’s underworld. Think a much more desperate version of Scorsese’s “After Hours” on speed and coke. The adrenaline-filled night is rife with madness and the most disturbing of violent actions. This is a richly textured genre exercise that is packed with one unforgettable scene after another, many of which may not have worked in any other director’s hands. The Safdies have created their most fully realized movie by making their most cinematic one, and yet still maintain the docu-style realism that has always been at the forefront of their singular vision. Pattinson is an enthralling lead, building up his character through facial expressions and bottled-up anger from the deepest, most bottomless pits of his soul. “Good Time” is high-class “gutter poetry.”

“Ingrid Goes West”
Matt Spicer‘s “Ingrid Goes West” dealt with our craze for social media in the most intelligent and assured of ways. The film has a career-making performance from Aubrey Plaza as an emotionally unbalanced, celebrity obsessed millennial who decides to head out west and stalk an Instagram celebrity (a pitch-perfect Elizabeth Olsen) to the brink of martyrdom. It’s one of the best dark comedies to come around in ages and smartly updates the stalker genre for the social media generation. It also captures a part of L.A. that as screenwriter and friend Matthew Wilder told me make it’s not just “a wacky satire but a documentary portrait of an L.A. with girls reading Joan Didion’s “The White Album” and sipping on their green cappuccino at Urrth Cafe, which has the spiritual mantra of “Another day, another avocado toast.” ‘Ingrid’ could become a defining movie of the current generation of click-bait, photo snapping millennials.