Review: "Baby Driver"

by Chris Feil

Edgar Wright is back in action movie mode for Baby Driver, a crime caper just slightly enough on the offbeat side enough to stand out among the summer franchise entries. Ansel Elgort stars as Baby (no, seriously), a iPod-attached getaway driver wrapping up an undefined debt to his somewhat paternal boss Doc (Kevin Spacey). There is Wright-ian wit to spare in the set pieces and characterizations as Baby wraps up his final mission and falls for waitress Debora (Lily James), but Driver is also his messiest. With a solid supporting ensemble that features a delightfully unhinged Jamie Foxx and Spacey on his more understated side of hammy, the film is nevertheless a great launching pad for Ansel Elgort as a multitalented leading man.

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Susan Hayward in "I'll Cry Tomorrow"

SUSAN HAYWARD CENTENNIAL WEEK

"this story was filmed on location... inside a woman's soul!"
-I'll Cry Tomorrow's tagline.

by Eric Blume

I’ll Cry Tomorrow, a biopic of singer Lillian Roth, won Susan Hayward the fourth of her five Oscar nominations, in 1955.  The film starts with a young Lillian and her stage mother, played by Jo Van Fleet. Ten minutes in, though, Hayward gets a true star entrance belting out “Sing You Sinners” in a lengthy number with only four cuts.

It’s a fun introduction, partially because you try to place yourself in 1955, when part of the excitement (one guesses) was hearing Hayward sing for the first time, and it’s quite a boisterous number. Then Hayward was known mostly as a tragedienne (Hollywood star variety), it must have been a blast for audiences to see Hayward let loose (Hollywood star style) in a big production number where she gets to snarl and dance (Hollywood star style, as the musicality doesn’t come easily to her)... 

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Charlize Lands Her Punches

by Nathaniel R

W Magazine is going all out with Charlize Theron at the moment. She's on the cover with a new interview, a gorgeous (what else) photoshoot, and there's also a retrospective of her other most compelling photos for the magazine in years pas -- who can forget that photoshoot with Michael Fassbender for Prometheus (*melts from the heat*).

Her new action flick Atomic Blonde has the unenviable task of following Mad Max Fury Road into theaters but thus far word is that it is a bonafide thrill machine as action flicks go. It opens on July 28th so expect Charlize to be everywhere for the next month including right here where we'll be sure to celebrate her career... albeit a little closer to the release. 

For now let's revel in this catfighty, rather than catty, anecdote about that time she punched Teri Hatcher in the face in a fight scene in her debut 2 Days in the Valley (1996) when she was just 20 years old:

I hit her really bad....

And because it was Teri Hatcher, who was a star, and I was this bleached-blonde-Amazonian, catsuit-wearing nobody who was punching her in the face, I was like a wild animal. Back then I didn’t know how to hone in my energy and I was knocking over lights. I had no concept of a set. I connected right with Teri Hatcher’s face. I felt terrible about it. I had no money and sent her some cheap beer the next day. Sorry, Teri.

YNMS: Detroit - Trailer #2

by Seán McGovern

Detroit could make Kathryn Bigelow's style definable. Both Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker tapped into a social, political and very American psyche of the moment. And unlike other filmmakers, hearing that Bigelow is to bring the 1967 Detroit riots to the screen seems absolutely appropriate. Bigelow has always had an eye for life teetering on a knife edge, of people on the fringes - be they wandering vampires, Soviet submariners or black market memory peddlers. Her two most recent films have cemented her as an auteur with a distinct vision but it's adjectives like tense, visceral or full-throated that define her. A director who has long appreciated genre pictures, it's thanks to her historic Oscar standing that her films now arrive with a sense of expectation.

A new trailer for Detroit has recently been released, doing what all good second trailers do: it tells us a little bit more, and hints to something different, both of which will be revealed after the jump...

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The Link Where It Happens

Link love time.

• Vulture Michelle Pfeiffer's ten essential roles
• Prizeo Lin-Manuel Miranda offers up the chance to win VIP tickets and a meet and greet at the opening night of Hamilton in Los Angeles with a donation to "Immigrants Get the Job Done Coalition". (And FYI two former Tony nominees Joshua Henry as Aaron Burr and Rory O'Malley as King George are in the company) 
• Vanity Fair on how difficult it is to get a gay film made in today's Hollywood. The headline to this is a bit misleading since it's like "in a post-Moonlight world" but let's be reasonable. Moonlight only made its dent a handful of months back. So most of the films cited didn't have Moonlight to point to when seeking financing

• THR More dirt on what happened behind the scenes on the troubled Han Solo movie
• Nerdist Why Megara is the MVP of Disney's Hercules
• Playbill The glorious Audra McDonald finally makes her West End debut, no big deal after 6 Tony Awards, reprising her Tony winning / Emmy nominated  Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill Billie Holiday role
• Buzzfeed the hardest game of 'would you rather' with hot cartoon dudes. I don't know. Most of these were easy for me but your mileage may vary.
• Variety offers up a franchise report card on the various series that are taking up so much of Hollywood's time and capital. But shouldn't Bond and Tarzan have been included in this roundup?
• Decider lists the '20 best foreign films on Netflix'... though the list would have been more exciting had they editorialized rather than just pulling the RT scores to determine which 20 to feature
• MNPP pic of the day with Edgar Wright at a Baby Driver screening

Exit Video
Check out this glorious montage of NYC (hat tip to Gothamist) as seen through the movies.

New York in Cinema - Supercut from Sergio Rojo on Vimeo.

God, I love living here. And one of my fav things in movies is city street scenes where the main character is just part of a huge walking crowd (the most classic visual example being Tootsie I think). How many movies did you instantly recognize?