Logan Lucky (Steven Soderbergh, 2017)

Soderbergh is clearly well and truly out of his notions of premature retirement by now, and it's just as well as he is, with plenty more in the pipeline and this rollicking piece, where Channing Tatum and Adam Driver play hick brothers planning a heist, this time not to do with a bank, but instead stealing the gambling proceeds of a NASCAR track. This being a compound of Soderbergh's wry slant on things and the modern heist formula, they of course turn out to be overconfident and dice with bungling the whole job at several junctures, of which there are dizzyingly many. It's not as much of a flashy parade of setpieces as its natural predecessors, the Ocean's Eleven films, but taken out that of that frame of reference, well in the upper quality echelons of the genre in terms of smartness and lightness of execution. Daniel Craig provides able comic support as an expert safe cracker, his mouth fumbling alarmingly with a southern accent, and overall the tone is effortlessly breezy. The director's break seems to have made sense.

7/10

The Founder (John Lee Hancock, 2016)

The story of how the McDonald's empire arose from one outlet in California run by a pair of brothers, The Founder benefits from the decision to give the role of Ray Kroc, the itinerant salesman who approaches the brothers in the 1950s to develop their business to Michael Keaton, who can do persuasive sloganeering and wheedling in his sleep. This is exactly what the role requires, as Kroc's natural capitalist opportunist sees the brothers' intransigence when he repeatedly tries to convince them to compromise for the sake of financial gain as carte blanche for him to act as he pleases with their brand, first rapidly creating a chain of franchises and then taking over completely. In other words, the title of the film really refers to Kroc as the founder of the empire, rather than the actual founders of the first restaurant. His machinations are the dramatic driving force of the story, and while that doesn't leave for much else of a human dimension, it's surprisingly entertaining given the potentially dry subject matter.

6/10