5. Summer 2011
Best Film: Release strategies were evolving so rapidly that May 2011 was actually more notable for the arthouse big-hitters that landed within days of each other: “The Tree of Life,” “Melancholia,” “Oslo, August 31,” “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” “The Skin I Live In” and “Drive” to name a few. But those films aren’t the focus of this piece, so here’s the only time we’re going to say that Paul Feig > Terrence Malick, Lars Von Trier et al, and name “Bridesmaids” the best “Summer movie” release. Which is maybe a little contrarian given the number of very good 2011 blockbusters, but Feig’s female-ensemble comedy hit feels like it changed the game in way that even the biggest action movie did not.
Worst Film: We could pretend we agonized over this but “Green Lantern.” It was always going to be “Green Lantern.” Notoriously awful Ryan Reynolds superhero flick is notoriously awful, after all.
And The Rest: A franchise was reborn with Justin Lin’s “Fast Five,” which, as it was released in April, alone would justify the choice to declare the spring months officially part of the summer movie season. While it would be pipped at the box office post by the unstoppable likes of the final ‘Harry Potter‘ installment, Shia LaBeouf‘s final go-round with the ‘Transformers’ (it’s the moon one), and the worst-so-far ‘Pirates’ movie, ‘Fast Five’ added The Rock to the nitro mix for the first time and alchemically produced the formula for perhaps the ultimate, infinitely expanding summer blockbuster franchise, also setting Dwayne Johnson on the path to becoming the biggest star in the world. But there were other notable releases: “Thor” turned out better than anyone expected, and “Captain America” better still. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” launched what’s possibly our absolute favorite summer movie franchise, despite seeming like a really bad idea on paper to anyone who remembered Tim Burton‘s godawful effort. Early in the year we got interesting indie/genre fusion experiments like Joe Wright’s “Hanna,” Joe Cornish’s “Attack the Block” and Duncan Jones’ “Source Code,” but we also got Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” to warn us to be careful what we wish for. But in the main, 2011 was pretty golden: for every “Cowboys and Aliens” or “Mr Popper’s Penguins” or “The Hangover 2” dud, you got a “Super 8″ or a “Crazy Stupid Love” or an “X-Men First Class” as mild counterbalance, with even the mid-range movies like “The Help,” “Horrible Bosses” and “Friends With Benefits” often ending up far more watchable than not.
4. Summer 2002
Best Film: “Minority Report” might not be Steven Spielberg’s best movie of this century — its awkward third act sees to that — or his best blockbuster, but it’s certainly his best blockbuster of the 21st century, and the most enduring movie of a strong summer. Turning Phillip K. Dick’s short story into an energetic, visually inventive future-noir full of interesting texture, from its eerily accurate futurism to terrific character cameos from actors like Lois Smith and Peter Stormare, it has a genuinely unpredictable plot, and two or three set pieces that sit among the helmer’s finest, plus a rare performance from its star that unites Tom Cruise the Movie Star and Tom Cruise the Proper Actor.
Worst Film: It was surprisingly difficult to find a movie that matches the lows of some of these other years — “Men In Black 2” doesn’t quite get there, but it’s a pretty dire follow-up to one of the best blockbusters of the 1990s. In theory it should have been a home-run: reuniting much of the team and original cast of the 1997 original. But in fact, that turns out to be part of the problem: the screenplay is mostly content to regurgitate jokes and cameos from the original while contorting itself to bring Tommy Lee Jones back into the world, all the while telling a plot that’s a thin echo of the already-thin original. To say that it’s the “Ghostbusters II” of the “Men In Black” series is, frankly, an insult to “Ghostbusters II.”
And The Rest: We guess that we didn’t really think at first of the summer of 2002 as a particularly terrific one off the top of our heads, but looking back, it’s hard to deny the quality and breadth of the movies that hit. Sure, the biggest movie of the season, “Attack Of The Clones,” was a near-“Phantom Menace”-sized disappointment. But otherwise, there were plenty of strong films: Sam Raimi’s original “Spider-Man,” Adrian Lyne’s 90s-erotica-throwback “Unfaithful,” Hugh Grant’s best-ever role with “About A Boy,” Christopher Nolan’s compelling thriller “Insomnia,” the original, genre-upending “The Bourne Identity,” a joyful Disney surprise with “Lilo & Stitch,” Sam Mendes’ best film with “Road To Perdition,” M. Night Shyamalan’s gripping “Signs,” and even the B-movie cult classic “Reign Of Fire.” Even some of the mid-tier movies — “Sum Of All Fears,” “Undercover Brother,” “Scooby Doo,” “Eight Legged Freaks,” “Austin Powers In Goldmember” — were better than they would normally be. Few of the good movies were truly great, which is why this doesn’t take the top slot, but we’d definitely go for a summer with this kind of consistency any time.
3. Summer 2017
Best Movie: In a year that brought new, original movies from masters like Christopher Nolan and Edgar Wright, it feels like a bit of a dick move to say that the best film was the third part of a franchise. But “War For The Planet Of The Apes” was that good. It might have fallen prey to the box office sequelitis that was hitting all over, but Matt Reeves’ trilogy-closer was the best of the rebooted series. Stirring and emotional without ever quite descending into hopeless bleakness, it’s an old-fashioned movie with the newest tech, jumping excitingly between a bunch of out-of-fashion genres (the Western, the Biblical epic, the POW escape movie), and loving and lingering on faces in a way that feels almost alien for a film with this many explosions.
Worst Movie: With the caveat that we haven’t yet seen “The Dark Tower,” which is probably terrible, this has to go to “The Mummy.” Perhaps out of naivety, we were oddly curious about the film, which was sold as a kind of “Mummy: Impossible” in a way that could be quite fun. But the result was a committee-made, joyless slog, a film that somehow managed to miscast eternal everyman Tom Cruise, that made almost no sense, and that allowed Russell Crowe to do not just one, but two terrible British accents, which is a bit like allowing a murderer to have not one, but two bullets in a gun. The only plus side of the movie is that it allowed the future of Universal’s Dark Universe to become uncertain.
And The Rest: We don’t quite buy into the idea that this was the best movie summer in decades, as some have suggested — there were some stretches with some bad movies, like when “Beauty & The Beast,” “Power Rangers” and “Ghost In The Shell” all hit within a few weeks in March, or the release of the worst “Fast & Furious” movie in a decade, or a lousy May stretch that brought “King Arthur,” “Alien Covenant,” “Pirates 5” and “Baywatch,” plus of course a “Transformers” movie. And bean counters aren’t happy with a box office that’s severely down. But we also got some of the weirdest, best-crafted big movies in ages: the mournful, deeply felt “Logan” proving that superhero movies could have some substance, the pleasingly strange, infectiously energetic “Kong: Skull Island,” the thoroughly decent “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2,” the genuinely heroic “Wonder Woman,” Bong Joon-Ho’s deliriously inventive “Okja” (our first Netflix movie on this list — a sign of the times…) Edgar Wright’s glorious 70s-crime musical mash-up “Baby Driver,” the second-best “Spider-Man” movie, Christopher Nolan’s intense, immersive, borderline experimental “Dunkirk,” and Steven Soderbergh roaring back to form with “Logan Lucky.” A line-up that strong will take some beating in the years to come.
2. Summer 2004
Best Film: It’s a sequel, it’s a comic-book movie and its IP gets rebooted every time we leave the room to put on the kettle, but “Spider-Man 2” is still a high watermark of tentpole filmmaking. Sam Raimi was relaxing into his role as director just as Tobey Maguire started to relax into his spandex suit, and for once the scaffolding of the superhero formula did not feel like it overwhelmed the emotional stakes. A lot of which was down to an all-time great, not-wholly-villainous villain in Alfred Molina‘s Doc Ock, and a denouement that has still never been bettered as an example of how superheroics can inspire ordinary people to acts of decency that are themselves quietly heroic.
Worst Film: It kind of feels like shooting fish in a barrel at this stage, but can there be any other choice here except “Catwoman“? One of the comic world’s most iconic heroines gets horribly short shrift and a borderline gynecologically skimpy outfit as Halle Berry husks her way through some of the worst-written dialogue ever to grace a summer movie screen, and given the competition, that’s saying something. Something like “Cat got your tongue?” while, sigh, holding someone’s tongue.
And The Rest: To be fair, the glass-half-empty brigade could also have a field day with 2004. Not only did we get the purrfectly awful “Catwoman,” but “Alien vs Predator” hobbled two once-great franchises in one fell swoop. “The Stepford Wives” proved unwatchable, “The Chronicles of Riddick” riddickulous, “Garfield” an abomination with the voice of Bill Murray, “White Chicks” offensively unfunny, “Van Helsing” an incoherent noisy mess. Probably Spielberg’s “The Terminal,” “Around the World in 80 Days,” “Thunderbirds” “Shrek 2” and “I, Robot” deserve almost as much disdain but we can’t remember that much about any of them, while “Troy” had the dubious claim to fame of reducing the decades-long siege of legend to a fortnight in Greece that still seemed to drag on forever. “The Day after Tomorrow” was dubious in its science but very convincing in its freeze-y SFX, so it was kind of fun, while “Dodgeball” gave a very old comedy formula a fresh lick of paint and a genius turn by Rip Torn, and “The Notebook” sold its particularly sticky variety of sap very well. But really, 2004 should be remembered as the year three (counting “Spider-Man”) of the most defining franchises of the century grew a beard: a long gray wizardy one in the case of Alfonso Cuaron’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” And after Doug Liman did such a fine job reinventing the spy thriller with “The Bourne Identity,” Paul Greengrass re-reinvented it with “The Bourne Supremacy.” Elsewhere the riches were lower-key and/or lower-budget but Michael Mann‘s great “Collateral,” Will Ferrell on peerless form in “Anchorman,” the surprisingly decent “Manchurian Candidate” remake, the better-than-you-remember “The Village” and terrifying microbudgeted indie “Open Water” all combine to ensure that summer 2004 had every base covered, and a critical hit in almost every one.
1. Summer 2008
Best Movie: It’s bro-y dark-and-gritty superfans have done their best to diminish it, but “The Dark Knight” still stands as the bests superhero movie ever made, a film that transcends its genre in a way that few thought possible before. Building on and entirely exceeding his work on “Batman Begins,” Christopher Nolan turns the Caped Crusader into a sprawling crime epic in a compelling, beautifully captured world that’s turned upside down with one of the most iconic performances of the last thirty years, thanks to Heath Ledger’s Joker. It’s not a perfect movie — that third act is a bit of a mess, and Two-Face never really works — but it’s a summer blockbuster of rare weight and substance.
Worst Movie: The easy answer would be M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening,” a resoundingly and utterly crap film that was misguided at every level. But you can’t help but wonder whether it’s in some way in on the joke, and it’s at least a joy to watch something so inept, whereas “Wanted” has no such pleasures to be derived from it. Timur Bekmambetov’s adaptation of Mark Millar tones down some of the empty provocations and near-fascistic nihilism of the source material, but not by much, and while the director might find an occasionally interesting image in there, its single real gimmick (bullets that bend!) isn’t enough to make up for the ugliness of its soul, or the lack of imagination in its story.
And The Rest: 2008 was not a great movie year, but it was, curiously, a great movie summer, and that was even with a couple of disappointments like the much-awaited “Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull” and “Hancock.” It was the year that the superhero movie came of age — not just with the aforementioned “The Dark Knight,” but with the birth of the all-conquering Marvel Cinematic Universe with “Iron Man,” and with Guillermo Del Toro’s superior sequel “Hellboy II.” It saw Pixar’s boldest and most accomplished movie to date with “Wall-E.” It saw the birth of a cult classic with The Wachowski’s dazzling pop-art curio “Speed Racer,” and one of the more effective stripped-down horror films of recent times with “The Strangers.” And it was a hell of a year for comedy: not just “Step Brothers,” a film that will one day be held in the Library Of Congress, but also “Pineapple Express,” “Tropic Thunder,” and even the underrated “Don’t Mess With The Zohan,” one of Adam Sandler’s best and silliest starring vehicles. Something for literally everyone.
So that turned out to be unexpectedly intricate! Tell us your thoughts below.