What was the best movie you watched this summer?
Apologies to those devoted to the September equinox, but summer… is over. And in the rearview mirror, a surprisingly major season for movies.
Queen Barbie reigned supreme at the box office, with Quality Films like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Oppenheimer right up there, too. We live in a wild time in which a new Wes Anderson movie (Asteroid City) outgrossed a new DreamWorks animated flick (Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken) and an A24 movie about Love and Stuff actually found a footing among the blockbusters (that’d be Past Lives). Even Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was solid, despite arriving in a Marvel slump.
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Money, of course, isn’t everything. Lots of smaller films roared in their own circles this summer, from Matt Johnson’s comedically searing tech drama BlackBerry — which gives It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton all the meat to chew on — to Tori and Lokita, the latest film from the Dardenne brothers, which crept over from the festival circuit onto VOD and the Criterion Channel without much fanfare. Then there’s the sheer amount of movies that hit streaming over the summer, which make them feel like new. Yeah, the Jackie Chan-inspired action comedy Polite Society and junkfood dino thriller 65 may have premiered earlier in the year, but they felt like summer releases when they finally dropped on Peacock and Netflix.
This is all just the new stuff. But the dog days of summer are also the perfect time to play catch-up, whether it’s with the minted hits of the winter and spring or with old films you’ve been meaning to get around to for a lifetime. I’m OK admitting I had a mostly good time watching The Flash this summer, but as far as spectacle goes, I had a deliriously transcendent time
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