Atomic Blonde

The director of ‘John Wick’ and the star of ‘Fury Road’ team up for the next great summer action movie.

As excited as we are for this summer’s Atomic Blonde  —  you can read our own glowing review from this year’s SxSW if you still need a gentle nudge  —  you’d think we’d be all over every new piece of footage from the movie. But it seems a few clips managed to slip through our fingers this past week, so I’m taking this opportunity to bring you back up to speed. Two new Atomic Blonde clips, each themed to a piece of period-appropriate music? Plenty of Charlize Theron kicking [expletive] and taking names? Yeah, that’s definitely worth circling back a little bit for those of you who may have missed these clips.

The calendar may have four seasons, but Hollywood’s calendar only really has two at this point: summer and awards, and summer seems to last longer and longer ever year. Though the start of May has long been the unofficial kickoff of the S.M.S., 2017 has already seen a King Kong movie, a ghost in a shell, and the fate of Fast & Furious franchise. The change from April to May is something of a formality in 2017. Once the Oscars are over, the summer begins.

Well, this looks entirely awesome.

For those of us who are already suffering from John Wick withdrawal, we}re about to have another kickass action hero on our hands. Atomic Blonde stars Charlize Theron, who was newly minted as an action star in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, and who looks like all of our what-if-James-Bond-but-a-woman fantasies come true. She’s the best at what she does, and what she does isn’t very nice.

Dozens of movies play at the SXSW Film Festival every year, making it impossible to see all of them in just eight days. Even if you attended the annual insanity in Austin last week, chances are pretty high that you missed at least a few good movies. And if you’re a cinephile who skipped the fest entirely (congrats on your sleep), you might be wondering which films are worth putting on your radar. Lucky for the sleepless and the well-rested alike, we’ve put together a handy list featuring some of the best films from SXSW 2017.

Teasers trailer and trailers for trailers are often superfluous and repetitive. But when Universal dropped two brief looks at Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde earlier this week, I was HYPED. Now the first full trailer has arrived, a restricted NSFW version that has a couple of F-bombs and a sex scene. How awesome is the above trailer? I kid you not, I squealed at my computer screen for about three-fourths of it. Then I watched it again. I’ll let you do the same, come back once you’ve finished.

In Summer of 2015 we entered the era of Charlize Theron, Badass Action Star, and that was only the beginning. Following her Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, Theron is on her way to becoming the ruthless action hero the movies need with her villain in the upcoming The Fate of the Furious and now Atomic Blonde.