After an exhausting summer at the movie theater, one phrase that I see being pretty indiscriminately bandied about is “2016 is a terrible year for movies.” Or, perhaps nearer to the point, is “this summer’s been terrible for movies.” While every season has its ups and downs, the overwhelming consensus is that there has been very little to off-set the dreck in the last four months.
Things may have started off with a bang, but tent-pole after tent-pole has seemingly failed to capture the collective imagination of the movie-going public. I may have thought that Ghostbusters was about as solid a comedy as they come, but its underperformance at the box office suggests that everybody else was just not having it. Warcraft, Independence Day: Resurgence and Ratchet and Clank all failed to find an audience. Even X-Men: Apocalypse, which I assumed was going to be one of the year’s biggest hits, failed to out-gross the first X-Men movie from 2000!
But that’s only half of the story. Despite the abject failure of the big summer releases, the season was far from a total wash. Even having missed out on some genuinely great-looking pieces of cinema (The Infiltrator, Money Monster, Hell or High Water), the summer was flush with genuinely great films. It’s just that, unlike previous years, most of the best were either smaller releases that were overshadowed by their more widely recognized brethren or came out so late in the summer that most people were focusing on going back school and the fall movie line-up.
And that’s a real shame, because 2016 has so far been about as good as any other year. That is, it is so long as you know where to look. So here’s your summer cheat-sheet: the ten best movies released between May and August 2016.
10. The Neon Demon — I have a somewhat complicated relationship with Nicholas Winding Refn. He’s an arthouse director with generally mainstream sensibilities. His work exists on the razor-thin border between accessible and obtuse. This means — often infuriatingly — that for every Drive he comes out with, there’s at least one Only God Forgives.
And although The Neon Demon mostly splits the difference between the two, it’s close enough to being the Drive of horror movies to warrant recommendation. It is a fascinating takedown of both the fashion industry and how our concept of self-image has become hopelessly tangled in our physical appearance. Although overly sparse and not quite as engaging as it should be, its more than capable cast and visual flair keeps it from just being the poor man’s Under the Skin.
9. The BFG — It still baffles me that more people didn’t see this when it was in theaters. In my elementary school, Roald Dhal was absolutely required reading, and The BFG was everybody’s favorite. When you add to that the timeless popularity of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the popular appeal of Steven Spielberg and its certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it is absolutely mind-boggling that made back only one third of its budget in the US.
As for the movie itself, I have no doubt that it will become a classic kids movie when its rediscovered on home video. The cast — especially the pint-sized Ruby Barnhill — is impeccable. It features all of the wholesome whimsy of childhood classics like E.T. and racks up another riveting John Williams score. It’s everything that you’d expect from a Spielberg film.
8. The Purge: Election Year — Like Refn’s filmography, the Purge franchise has been pretty hit-and-miss for me. The first introduced a darkly imaginative premise for a rather pedestrian home-invasion flick. The second, while a genuinely great film, juggled enough plot points for several sequels and never quite developed any one of them sufficiently.
The most recent entry to the franchise reigned in the rather ungainly place that Anarchy left off. Its DC-set story is incredibly ambitious for the third in a franchise and absolutely sticks the landing. Although it still features a few too many subplots for its own good, it is a more focused and tightly plotted film than either of its predecessors. The political backdrop takes the series’ logic to its logical extreme, resulting in the most chillingly memorable scenes of the entire franchise.
7. Star Trek Beyond — Okay, I’ll admit it. I have never been a fan of the Star Trek series. I found the show dull and the movies downright laughable. I hated The Voyage Home. I even hated The Wrath of Khan. That changed with the release of 2009’s Star Trek and its sequel, Into Darkness.
Although Beyond clearly misses Abrams’ directorial flair, Justin Lin proves to be no slouch in that department. The film’s sharp script — penned by series actor Simon Pegg — is a massive improvement on its more streamlined and action-packed predecessors. Its focus on characters — and particularly on interactions between characters not often paired together — is a massive breath of fresh air during a summer of unprecedentedly stale blockbusters.
6. Sing Street — I sadly missed this one during its “blink and you’ll miss it” theatrical run. It only showed at my local theater for a solitary week. I found out about it the following Friday, after it was replaced by more typical summer fair. In those short couple of days, the guy who recommended it to me saw it three times.
Essentially “Irish Footloose,” the film follows a down-on-his-luck teen’s attempts to form a band and get the girl. Its soundtrack — a mix of classic 80’s hits and original songs performed by the titular band — is sublime, featuring several real contenders for “Best Original Song” at this years Oscars. While it never quite amps the drama up as much as it could (and probably should) have, it is an engrossing coming of age story that’s bound to resonate with a lot of movie-goers, young and old alike.
5. The Nice Guys — More than anything, The Nice Guys suffered from poor timing. It came out a week after Civil War, which predictably dominated the field in its second week. The problem was that opening alongside Neighbors 2 meant that it didn’t even work as a piece of counter-programming. The only people who had seemingly heard about it were die-hard theater-goers like myself, and even most of them turned a blind eye to it.
Writer-director Shane Black — whose credits include writing the first two Lethal Weapons, The Last Action Hero and both writing and directing Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3 — knows how to deliver a high-end action-comedy headlined with A-list talent. The Nice Guys is a sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-cerebral sometimes-adrenaline-fueled callback to 80s Action and 70’s Neo Noir. It is every bit as good as the more comedy-minded Deadpool, only without all of the spandex.
4. The Conjuring 2 — The only mantra as often repeated in Hollywood as “don’t bother remaking a classic” is “the sequel is never as good as the original.” And, barring the rare exception, this has held true. For every Godfather Part 2, there’s a Halloween III. For every Terminator 2, there’s a Jaws: The Revenge. For every Aliens, there’s a Psycho II.
Having previously named The Conjuring one of the best horror films of the century, I had resigned myself to the inevitable reality that its sequel would not live up to the first film. Not only was The Conjuring 2 a worthy successor to the 2013 film that inspired it, but in every respect it is a clearly superior film. The direction is more certain, the writing more focused, the acting more capable and the scares altogether more terrifying. The demonic nun in particular was a nightmarishly inspired villain, far better than either The Conjuring‘s witch or Annabel‘s possessed doll.
3. Sausage Party — Here is a movie that should never have been greenlit. That’s not to say that it’s a bad movie; it’s easily the funniest one to come out this summer. It’s just that precedent — not to mention common sense — was against it from the start. R-rated animated films just don’t happen. The few exceptions to this serve only to prove the rule. Akira was made well outside of Hollywood and Southpark: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was based on the monstrously popular TV series of the same name. Sausage Party is an original, American production featuring some of the biggest names in comedy.
And yet, despite all this, it turned out to be more than just “Toy Story for stoners.” I’d go so far as to say that it’s the single best film Seth Rogen’s ever made. It uses its somewhat familiar premise as a bouncing-off point for a series of incredibly clever visual gags that run the gamut from sexual to ethnic. The no-holds-barred audacity of its direction, paired with a surprisingly intelligent script, gives us perhaps the most thought-provoking take on atheism ever put to film. And yeah, after watching this, I completely understand why that guy in Miami ate another guy’s face after doing Bath Salts.
2. Captain America: Civil War — Marvel just can’t seem to do anything wrong. Even Iron Man 2 — easily the worst film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — was a perfectly serviceable summer action flick. The best of them rank among the centuries best films.
And while Civil War can’t help but fall short of The Winter Soldier‘s unprecedented quality, it never-the-less ranks among The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy as the very best that the MCU has to offer. Everything that Dawn of Justice did wrong, Civil War absolutely nailed. Its characters a complex, flawed and entirely human. . It knows when to be dark and when to make light of itself. Its gold-standard action sequences are built to by a series of progressively high-stakes character moments, not rushed into out of some juvenile need to see more punching.
1. Kubo and the Two Strings — This really was the summer when so many of the best movies of the Summer went sight unseen and so many of the worst went on to become multi-million dollar hits. People always complain about how “Hollywood’s running out of ideas,” but they never seem to put money on the long shots: on original, inventive stories from proven filmmakers.
Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Laika. Despite all of their acclaim, I never quite got into Coraline and ParaNorman to the same extent that everybody else did. I’m not even the biggest fan of stop-motion animation, which always at least somewhat awkward to look at, and often outright inferior to more traditional approaches to animation. Kubo absolutely blew me away, however: instantly becoming not just my favorite movie of the summer, but of the entire year. It was an astoundingly beautiful film, with a breathtaking story, riveting action and immensely engrossing characters.
If it’s still playing near you, watch it while you can. If not… well, there’s always BluRay.
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