The Unclean House: mother!, reviewed.

Javier Bardem, Jennifer Lawrence and the chorus. (Paramount)

No one is under any obligation to like Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (sic) (or his mother) or any other movie (or person), obviously. Even so, mother! is the sort of challenging picture that offers a good test for whether a critic—regardless of where he or she stands on the question of the film’s artistic merit—has any imagination at all. I’ve seen some fine writing on this movie and some truly dreadful, dumb, reductive writing. I hope my own NPR review is one of the former specimens, even though it takes the form of a long argument against you reading it.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Logan Lucky, discussed.

Workaholic artist Steven Soderbergh on the set of Logan Lucky. (Bleecker St.)

I dropped by NPR HQ to talk about Steven Soderbergh's return to features, Logan Lucky, with screenwriter and author Danielle Henderson and regular Pop Culture Happy Hour panelists Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon.  When we recorded this discussion, I'd taken the opportunity to see the movie a second time after filing my review, and my opinion on it had evolved a little. Anyway, you can find the episode here.

I wish I could put my finger on why it read to me as condescending in a Coenesque way the first time but not the second. I love the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. But the ones Logan Lucky most recalled for me, Raising Arizona and Fargo, are not among my favorites.

Hillbilly Elegy: Logan Lucky, reviewed.

Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, and Adam Driver as the luck-starved Logan clan. 

Logan Lucky, Steven Soderbergh’s return to features after a four-year “retirement” in prestige TV, is a lot of fun, though I’m not as high on it as some. I have the same reservations about it that I do about the Coen Brothers films it most readily recalls. Anyway, here’s my review.

Don’t Forget the Motor City: Detroit, reviewed.

Anthony Mackie plays Robert Greene, a Vietnam veteran assaulted by police in Detroit.

Review-writing is easier when you can interrogate your responses to the work and make judgments quickly. Detroit just wasn't one of those movies for me.

I thought it was important to try to discern exactly where the Bigelow-Boal directing/screenwriting duo deviated from or compressed the facts, which is hard in a 50-year-old case where so many of the facts were disputed. But I also saw some odd parallels between this movie and a couple of the ones Bigelow made before her historic Oscar win changed the way we receive her work. So my review is, among other things... long.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Atomic Blonde

The Mondo two-LP blue-and-yellow-vinyl edition of the soundtrack to David Leitch's stylish Charlize Theron-headlined, set-in-1989 espionage thriller Atomic Blonde that I ordered won't arrive for several weeks, I'm told. Until then you and I will just have to make do with our extant libraries of New Order, The Clash, A Flock of Seagulls, etc. And with this thrilling recorded-in-one take episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon brought me in to talk about how much we all like watching Ms. Theron kick ass. It's a lot more satisfying that watching her play second-fiddle to some grunting no-talent clown in a tank top.

Wartime in a Bottle: Dunkirk, reviewed.

400,000 stranded British soldiers await rescue on the frigid beach at Dunkirk. (Warner Bros.)

I've never understood the objection that Christopher Nolan's movies are sterile. Dunkirk, his new dramatization of the 1940 rescue of British soldiers from the beaches of Northern France carried out largely by civilians, knocked me flat. Here's my review.

By Any Means Necessary, Any Which Way You Can: War for the Planet of the Apes, reviewed.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) came to eat bananas and kick ass, and he's all out of bananas. (Fox)

What a Craig Finn-style blockbuster summer we're having this year. Nothing as visionary as Mad Max: Fury Road from 2015, maybe, or as congruent with my own sensibilities as The Nice Guys from last year, but everything I picked sight unseen for my Village Voice/LA Weekly summer movie preview—Wonder Woman, The Beguiled, Baby Driver, Spider-Man: Homecoming—has so far avoided embarrassing me. I even liked Rough Night okay. It's possible I'm not all that discerning a critic.

But my praise for War of the Planet of the Apes is well-founded. Even though I saw the movie weeks before I was assigned to write about it, which might be why the review is uncharacteristically (I hope) light on specific observations.

I'm seeing Dunkirk—and talking with Christopher Nolan!—as soon as I get home from my present holiday in Scotland, and Atomic Blonde and Detroit in short order after that.

Nobody Puts Baby Driver in a Corner!

You wouldn't guess it, but Ansel Elgort recalls the amateur auto racer Paul Newman.

I've liked all of writer-director Edgar Wright's movies, so it's no surprise that I flipped for his comic thriller Baby Driver. It sings like Freddie Mercury, it dances like Fred Astaire, it burns enough rubber to curl Vin Diesel's hair.  Run, don't walk; but for God's sake don't drive because you're likely to kill someone on your way home.