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