Bonnie Baby a cool customer

finest non-television performance in over a decade.

Lily James is a world away from her Downton Abbey and Cinderella roles as tough-buttender waitress Debora and getting back to epitomising coolness, Jon Hamm (Buddy), Jon Bernthal (Griff ) and Eiza González (Darling) are that personified as members of a hottempered bank-robbing crew with a penchant for witty and wacky dialogue – and that’s not even taking Jamie Foxx’s cynical career thief Bats into consideration.

While Wright is short of old buddies Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Baby Driver is almost as funny as the trio’s Cornetto trilogy escapades – with a layer of sweetness and light missing from Wright’s earlier work.

His Cornetto capers weren’t short of a set piece or two, but with Baby Driver, Wright dials up the action; Elgort’s driving skills match Ryan Gosling’s in Drive as Baby spins, smashes and soars across, around, over and through the roads of Atlanta, Georgia.

Wright’s camera is never far away either, even putting the audience literally in the driving seat, and it’s nice to see a more practical, realistic approach taken to vehicular sequences following the submarine-battling Fast & Furious carnage.

It’s fitting that two of the four cool flicks I mentioned at the start of this review were from Quentin Tarantino as Wright’s latest is worthy of comparison with his fellow director’s best.

Breezy, breathless and defying expectations, Baby Driver is well on the road to being crowned one of 2017’s finest.