Bumblebee (2018)

About a teen who befriends, educates and culturally integrates a refugee she discovers living, in fear of war aggressors, in a Californian scrapyard, this is a big dumb empty blockbuster and mildly entertaining entry in the Transformers series of movies based on the Hasbro toys, but it is hard not to also see it as a missed opportunity - what a watershed moment in cinema it would have been had it just been released as Short Circuit: Fully Loaded or, I think even better, Herbie: Dark Side of the Lovebug, a big cgi blockbuster reboot of one or the other of the two movies Bumblebee mashes together for its plot.

★★★☆☆

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Baby Driver (2017)

Baby, a getaway driver for thieves, blocks out the bad around him by listening to killer music on his iPod all day, but eventually he has to de-bud and deal with the chaos closing in around him, not just that created by the psychopaths he is inextricably tied up with and who are growing more trigger-happy by the second but also the chaos of director Edgar Wright's plot which, like the psychopaths, starts off stylish and engaging but quickly becomes unreasonable and descends into a loud mess with little pay-off.

★★★☆☆

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