The 25 Best Films of 2017 (So Far)

In a typical year, we don’t get most of the really good movies until after Labor Day. Comparatively speaking, maybe that will still be true of 2017, but the first 2/3 of the year has seen an uncharacteristic embarrassment of riches. Just right now, on Labor Day weekend, at the multiplex a mile from my house, are eight (8!!) films with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of over 80%. That is unheard of for this time of year.

Now, there’s certainly a case to be made that the increased ubiquity of Rotten Tomatoes in determining the choices of moviegoers has led to less dissension among critics (because it singles them out more obviously and calls their against-the-grain opinions into question more savagely), and perhaps great Rotten Tomatoes scores are easier to come by than they ever have been before. But even still, I believe we’ve probably already seen three or four Best Picture nominees this year (rare for pre-September releases), and 2017 has undoubtedly been the best year for action cinema since the heydays of the early-‘90s.

Indeed, I had initially planned on just writing a Top 20 of the year so far, but my initial list of 38 possibilities meant cutting down to 20 was just too difficult.

1.    Get Out

I won’t bury the lead; Get Out is the most interesting movie about race that I’ve ever seen. It’s also among the movies I’ve spent the most time wrestling with in my head. At its most uncomfortable core, it’s a film about white fascination with the bodies of black men, and the need to evaluate and control those bodies for our own use—be it sports, labor, or even the pervasive fantasies of “bbc” porn (*not* a reference to the British Broadcasting Corporation). I’m confident in saying Get Out will be studied and dissected for generations.

2.    The Big Sick

When I saw this at Sundance, I heard a packed theater in Utah laugh hysterically at a Pakistani immigrant making a 9/11 joke. That’s how I knew I was watching something special. The Big Sick works so well because it hits on so many elements and themes that are universal to the human experience—love, family, tradition, immigrants, forgiveness, parental expectations, healthcare, and having to spend time with your ex-girlfriend’s parents while she’s in a coma. We’ve all been there. This true story is funny, sad, touching, and uplifting.

3.    Good Time

As a big believer that the last ten minutes of The Last of the Mohicans are as utterly perfect as cinema gets, it makes sense that Good Time would so enrapture me. It’s all propulsive score, kinetic editing, and adrenalized characters running across New York. But in this case, the score is electronic (and incredible), and the New York we get is a dirty part of Queens. This is as stylish as a crime movie can get without sacrificing its lowlife authenticity.

4.    Atomic Blonde

2017 had already given us Baby Driver’s incredible action soundtrack and John Wick: Chapter 2’s incredible neon action set pieces (read about both a little further down), but Atomic Blonde somehow combined both. Charlize Theron, as a spy in Cold War–era Berlin, in fight scenes choreographed as impossible long takes and tracking shots, set to ‘80s Europop songs (New Order, Depeche Mode, Bowie, etc.). Yes please. I only wish the totally superfluous lesbian sex scene had been cut so I don’t feel quite as predictable for loving this movie so much.

5.    Detroit

At the heart of Detroit is a centerpiece scene of police interrogation and brutality that’s probably over an hour long, and despite how harrowing it is to watch, it’s so equally intense that turning away didn’t even occur to me. I was too locked in its thrall. Most filmmakers wouldn’t have the confidence to hold a movie’s collective breath for that long, but Kathryn Bigelow is as much “not most filmmakers” as anyone can get. This movie will anger some people, but that’s okay. Provocative art should be divisive sometimes.

6.    Baby Driver

After Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Shaun of the Dead, director Edgar Wright clearly has a knack for making me fall in love with movies that I wasn’t sure would be my cup of tea. Baby Driver’s genius is all in the tunes, and Wright perfectly nails making them not seem too cool for their own good. More than anything, the movie sounds like someone with great taste just left their iPod on shuffle—there’re a few classics, several deep cuts, and a few kitschy things that absolutely aren’t getting apologized for. Nor should they be.

7.    Spider-Man: Homecoming

We’d already gotten two Spider-Man movies this decade—in 2012 and 2014—and the second one felt so stale that the series was prematurely cancelled. Seeing Marvel resurrect the franchise just three years later, and somehow making the freshest, liveliest superhero film in years, is a mini-miracle. What Homecoming gets so right (and what none of the five previous Spidey films really attempted) is that it’s a high school movie more than anything. It’s Marvel’s best attempt yet at fusing a superhero flick with a traditional movie genre.

8.    Wind River

After writing two great films, Sicario and Hell or High Water, Taylor Sheridan completes his trilogy on the American frontier with this, his directorial debut. Like its predecessors, Wind River is principally about a place (in this case, a Wyoming Indian reservation), and the crime that develops from the collective struggles of its inhabitants. Sheridan’s work explores how differing concepts of justice manifest across disparate places, and that’s on full display here. He’s already a contender for the best screenwriter of his generation.

9.    John Wick: Chapter 2

As a piece of pure entertainment, Chapter 2 ups its predecessor with better fights and better locales. But John Wick: Chapter 2 also manages to function as a sneaky piece of art cinema—most of it’s fights and chases are filmed amid neon accent lights and reflective surfaces, making this (maybe) the most interestingly shot mainstream action movie ever. One scene particularly reminded me of Enter the Dragon’s climactic mirror sequence.

10.  Lady Macbeth

For as long as I can remember, my least favorite film genre has always been British period pieces in which aristocratic characters wallow in ennui about their boring, privileged lives. If you feel the same, then Lady Macbeth is absolutely the movie for you. It’s basically Breaking Bad: “19^th century English countryside edition.” Or, think of it as the first Game of Thrones prequel; watch a normal girl turn into Cersei Lannister in a brisk 90 minutes.

11.  Columbus

The concept seems like pure Linklater—two people at a personal crossroad meet in a city famous for its architecture, and then they walk around, look at the buildings, and talk about life. But the execution is much more like classic art house cinema—Ozu or Bresson. The frames are perfectly composed, the camera barely moves, and the film is quiet, pensive, and lyrical. It’s almost a visual work of modernist theory, but done as a non-experimental, traditional narrative. That won’t be an endorsement for everyone, but it’s really lovely.

12.  A Ghost Story

Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play a married couple living in a small house. Then, he dies. He returns to their house as a ghost (with a sheet over his head). As time passes, he silently observes his wife, and, eventually, new tenants in the property. If this doesn’t sound interesting to you, then it probably won’t be. A Ghost Story is a meditation on the passage of time, and part of its arsenal is making you, the viewer, fully experience that feeling of time passing. It’s slow, but that’s the point. It’s also profound and beautiful.

13.  Whose Streets?

There are (basically) two kinds of documentaries—those that capture something as it’s happening, and those that illuminate the past. Films of the first type rarely capture major events that shake a nation, because you can’t normally plan for such things and filmmaking takes preparation. Whose Streets?, a first-hand account of the Ferguson riots following the shooting of Michael Brown, is an exception. It’s an intense, heartbreaking, and monumental piece of history. If you don’t understand the Black Lives Matter movement, please please see this.

14.  The LEGO Batman Movie

It’s hopelessly and depressingly ironic that, while DC won’t allow their characters to be funny in their official films, when their parent company, Warner Bros., makes a LEGO movie out of DC characters, it’s the funniest movie of the year. DC wants their films to be unrelentingly dark, but The LEGO Batman Movie fully takes the piss out of that darkness, and out of Batman’s entire (fictional) psyche. It’s as epic a takedown of the character as could be imagined, but it’s done in an incredibly loving, hilarious, and creative way.

15.  Dunkirk

I fall in the minority who did not think Dunkirk was an utter masterpiece of cinema. It’s a survival story in which I didn’t care about who actually survived, because the film only used its characters as props. It’s the first Christopher Nolan film that didn’t care deeply about psychology, and when the denouement came, I felt nothing. However, as a piece of technical craftsmanship, Dunkirk truly is a masterpiece, which is why I couldn’t possibly leave it off this list. The air battles alone are worth the price of admission.

16.  Raw

Seriously, I was the last person that ever thought I might like a cannibal horror film. Raw premiered at two different major festivals I attended and I stayed the hell away. Only after great reviews and friends’ recommendations made me feel obligated to see it did I begrudgingly do so. But damn, it’s great stuff. Really, it’s less of a cannibal flick and more like David Cronenberg (in classic, pseudo-erotic body-horror mode) directing a Chemical Brothers music video. It’s not for the weakest of stomachs, but I handled it just fine.

17.  Colossal

For a plot description of Colossal, I’ll leave it to how the director, Nacho Vigalondo, first described it to co-star Jason Sudeikis (please try to read this in a thick Spanish accent): “It’s about a woman who, every time she drinks, a monster attacks South Korea.” In terms of plot, yep, that’s Colossal. But what it’s really *about* are the ways jealous men attempt to control women, and how the women can break free. It’s strange and kinda ridiculous, but it’s the best (only?) feminist monster movie since Aliens. Anne Hathaway kills it.

18.  Wonder Woman

In some ways, because of the stakes, the best thing about Wonder Woman is that it doesn’t suck. But that shouldn’t diminish the fact that it’s also really good! Every Marvel superhero movie seemingly doubles as a comedy, and the other DC superhero movies just represent a corporation’s idea of a 14-year-old boy’s idea of psychological complexity. But Wonder Woman succeeds at something that’s become a complete afterthought in comic book movies—it’s actually inspiring. It allows its hero to feel purely heroic. In 2017, we all need that.

19.  Ingrid Goes West

When a disturbed young woman (played by Aubrey Plaza) becomes obsessed with an Instagram “influencer,” she decides to seek her out IRL and be her friend. Ingrid is hard to nail down into a genre. It’s not so much a black comedy as it’s just a depressing comedy. Like the great “Nosedive” episode of Black Mirror, Ingrid Goes West is an exploration of what the need for social media “Likes” is doing to us, and the psychological problems that can emanate from it. At the very least, it’s a film that might make you put your phone down for a bit.

20.  I, Daniel Blake

When the titular Daniel Blake, a carpenter in New Castle, can no longer work because of a heart condition, he discovers the British welfare system is designed less to help people than to deter people from receiving help. The winner of the 2016 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, this isn’t a movie with a happy ending, but it reflects reality all too clearly. As we watch our own government continue to dehumanize us, I, Daniel Blake is a heartbreakingly relevant film about not letting the system steal your dignity from you.

21.  Patti Cake$

There are elements of Patti Cake$—about an overweight Jersey girl with the talent and dreams of becoming a rap star—that feel overly familiar. It’s an underdog story, and a story about attempting to belong in a subculture that doesn’t want you. But Patti Cake$ knocks it out of the park in two prime areas: the tunes are wonderful and potent, and the characters (and actors) have a genuine earnestness in their search for acceptance that’s truly affecting. If you’re looking for a crowd-pleaser, this is it.

22.  Logan Lucky

After directing three Ocean’s movies, and three movies with Channing Tatum, Steven Soderbergh came out of his self-imposed feature-film retirement to combine his two favorite pastimes. But somehow, Logan Lucky, which is basically a redneck version of an Ocean’s movie (set at a West Virginia NASCAR race instead of a Vegas casino), feels more like a Coen Brothers movie—it’s all about the characters’ local dialect and amusing drawl. But hey, anytime you can see a movie that combines Soderbergh and the Coens (kind of), what are you waiting for?

23.  Band Aid

At first glance, Band Aid seems like one of those indie movies; you know, the kind where you read the plot and just think it arrived off of a bearded hipster assembly line. A husband and wife who can’t stop fighting decide to turn their fights into songs and form an indie-pop band. With Fred Armisen on drums, natch. But Band Aid isn’t merely cutesy-funny (though it is that, too). There’s real emotion, pathos, and pain explored here, and writer/director/star Zoe Lister-Jones is a revelation of talent.

24.  Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

It’s a misconception that the government didn’t go after any banks after the 2008 financial crisis. They did actually go after *one*: a small bank in New York’s Chinatown called Abacus. But why was this tiny, family-run operation being prosecuted while the Wall Street executives behind the crash were just cashing their bonus checks? That’s what documentary filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself) explores here, in a powerful story about a small immigrant family literally taking on the government. Telling stories like this is why great documentaries remain so vital.

25.  The Hounds of Love

When I say this movie might not be for you, I mean it *really* might not be for you. It’s an Aussie movie about a teenage girl who gets kidnapped by a couple to be their temporary sex slave, but she starts playing her captors against each other. It’s not a pleasant film (at all), but its style and use of music is hypnotic. Yes, I know how awful it is to laud the style of a movie that’s basically about rape and torture. But you have to love anything that does to “Nights in White Satin” what Reservoir Dogs did to “Stuck in the Middle with You.”  

And now we’re off to the fall “good movie” season! Will any of the above still be around for my end-of-the-year list? Stay tuned.

It's Mid-August, but We've (Probably) Already Seen 3 or 4 Best Picture Nominees

When the Oscars expanded their Best Picture lineup in 2009, they had a major goal in mind—get popular, acclaimed summer movies into the race. This problem had boiled over earlier in the year, when two of the most critically acclaimed and popular movies of 2008—Wall-E and The Dark Knight—received a combined 14 Oscar nominations but were inexplicably left out of the Best Picture race in favor of films like Milk and Frost/Nixon, which had been largely ignored by audiences. For the Oscars, what had previously just been a ratings problem was suddenly a credibility problem as well.

Ratings for the Oscar telecast had been in a slump for several years, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) could (sort of) swallow that as long as they were still (sort of) rewarding the right films. But when suddenly the two best reviewed films of the year, which also happened to be in the top five grossers of the year, couldn’t get invited to the dance, the apparent bias against anything but prestige dramas became too problematic too ignore. So the Best Picture lineup was expanded from five to ten. The theory was that this would allow Academy members to throw real support behind a few mega-populist (summer) films each year, without sacrificing their appetites for weightier fare. And this even worked… for a time.

In the first two years of the expanded Best Picture lineup (‘09 and ‘10), eight films received Best Picture nominations despite opening before Labor Day, including two traditional summer movies each year—2009’s Up and District 9, and 2010’s Inception and Toy Story 3. But Pixar films make for a great case study in how short-lived this change really was. 2008’s Pixar movie, Wall-E, was one of the lightning rods that led to the expansion of the Best Picture pool, and it focused attention on how Pixar was getting screwed. The rewards were immediate; the next two Pixar films, Up and Toy Story 3, both got Best Picture nominations, and it briefly looked like the problem had been solved. But since then, no Pixar film has gotten a Best Picture nomination. Now, to be fair, 2011-2016 wasn’t exactly the company’s hottest qualitative stretch, and I’m certainly not suggesting Cars 2 got robbed. But consider Inside Out: its Rotten Tomatoes score was 98%, its Metacritic score was 94, and it made over 850 million dollars. But it didn’t get a Best Picture nomination. Instead, it had to settle for a Best Original Screenplay nomination and a Best Animated Feature win. Inside Out exemplified absolutely everything the Best Picture category was expanded to include—immense popular success, immense critical success, a traditionally ignored movie season, and a traditionally ignored movie genre—but it still couldn’t get in the race.

So what happened? We have to go back to 2011, when the Best Picture race changed course once again. After two years of the 10-film Best Picture lineup, and an initial ratings bump that had already dissipated, the Academy once again decided that prestige mattered more than populism. In the previous two years, under the 10-nominee system, voters ranked their 10 favorite films of the year, and each numeric ranking carried a different weight in the final tallies. But if a film showed up on enough ballots, even in the bottom few spots, it would probably crack the final 10 nominees. In 2011, that was done away with. Starting that year voters would still rank their 10 favorites, but a film could no longer receive a Best Picture nomination purely on the strength of showing up in the lower rungs of enough ballots. Now, if a film didn’t receive at least 5% of the total first place votes, it wouldn’t receive a Best Picture nomination, regardless of how many total ballots it showed up on. With around 6,000 members in the Academy (at the time), that meant a film must get a minimum of around 300 first-place votes to receive a Best Picture nomination. This also meant that now the number of Best Picture nominees is in constant flux. It can be anywhere from five to ten, purely depending on how the first-place votes shake out.

On face value, this new system made sense—if at least 5% of the Academy doesn’t think you’re the Best Picture of the year, then why should you get a Best Picture nomination? But in practice, this meant that summer movies and non-traditional genres had been kicked out once again. In 2011, the first year of this revised system, only three summer films landed Best Picture nominations and they were a Civil Rights period piece, a Woody Allen movie, and a Terrence Malick art film that provoked theaters to warn patrons about how quickly they need to walk out in order to receive full refunds. (Seriously.) And since then, summer releases have been almost completely ignored; Out of the 43 Best Picture nominees from 2012-2016, a total of five were released before Labor Day, and four of those were indies. Only one out of the last 43 Best Picture nominees—Mad Max: Fury Road—was a true summer movie in the traditional sense of the term.

But 2017 could be the year that upends this pattern. When Moonlight shockingly won Best Picture earlier this year, after nearly two full minutes of La La Land acceptance speeches, there was a collective public temptation to just say, “Well, this has been the year of unlikely endings.” As though, after Brexit, the Cavs, the Cubs, Trump, and the Patriots’ absurd second-half Super Bowl comeback, Moonlight’s win (after many viewers had already turned off the Oscar telecast) could be purely explained away as just the latest in a year of truly bizarre and unlikely victories, and no attempt at logical explanation need be applied. But the ultimate lesson of Moonlight’s win isn’t, “Hey, 2016 was pretty weird, amiright?”, but rather that AMPAS has evolved into a very different group of people, and we shouldn’t expect them to vote in the same old ways.

In the last two years, AMPAS has invited almost 1,500 new members to join, while also removing the voting rights of several older members that haven’t been involved in the film industry for a long time. According to some reports, these new member classes give the Academy a 359% increase in women and a 331% increase in people of color. Yes, the average AMPAS member is still an old white male. But the membership is suddenly a hell of a lot younger, more diverse, and more #woke.

Based partially on what this new-look Academy seems primed to respond to, and partially on what the old-look Academy has always responded to, I think we’ve probably already seen three or four Best Picture nominees—even though Labor Day is still a few weeks away. Let’s look at them individually, in order of release date.

Get Out

Going by any traditional sense of Oscar history, this “social thriller” from Jordan Peele, which is, basically, a horror movie, shouldn’t have much of a chance. Depending on how precisely you want to define the horror genre, the last horror movie to receive a Best Picture nomination was one of the following: The Sixth Sense (1999), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Jaws (1975), or The Exorcist (1973). So it’s either been 18 years, over 20 years, or over 40 years. Not a great track record.

But what those four films have in common is that they all transcended the horror genre to become massive cultural talking points, and nearly everyone saw them. More than anything, that’s why they made it to Oscar night—because they simply couldn’t be ignored. By that metric, Get Out actually looks like a very safe bet. Among post-Exorcist horror films so popular and acclaimed that even non-horror fans saw them in droves, only The Blair Witch Project has failed to get a Best Picture nomination.

The Silence of the Lambs makes for a particularly interesting comparison. Like Get Out, it opened in mid-February, before the previous year’s Oscar ceremony had even happened. And like Get Out, it’s a film that’s far less interested in momentary jump scares than it is in just wanting to deeply disturb and unsettle you, even after the credits roll. That’s the most important element that carried The Silence of the Lambs to Oscar night more than a year after its theatrical release—it stayed with people. It wrapped itself up into voter’s guts and didn’t let go. Can Get Out do the same thing? In 2017, yes, I think it can.  

Get Out is the exact type of movie primed to be recognized by the diverse new Academy members. It is one of the most fascinating and original commentaries on race in recent history (and, honestly, perhaps ever). It became a major talking point of the zeitgeist, and the Los Angeles Times declared it a “cultural phenomenon,” at a time where it’s virtually impossible for any film not based on pre-existing properties to ever achieve such an impact. Critically, Get Out is only the ninth American film to ever receive at least a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with over 100 reviews factored in, and six of the other eight won Oscars. It had a reported $4.5 million budget and made over $250 million. It also became the highest grossing film by a black filmmaker in American box office history. So Get Out wasn’t merely a success with critics and audiences, it was a profound and unprecedented success in both arenas.

And remember, because of the new Best Picture voting rules, it doesn’t matter if the older members of the Academy resoundingly hate (or worse, don’t understand) the movie. It only needs 350-ish first place votes to get a nomination, and it could get that many just from this year’s new member class. Unless Universal declines to mount a campaign for it (which would be insane), hitting that number will almost certainly not be a problem.

The Big Sick

When predicting Oscar results, pundits often like to try and game out which groups or quadrants of voters a movie will appeal to. The huge advantage The Big Sick will have is that there’s almost no segment of voter it won’t appeal to.

The Big Sick is both very funny and very dramatic. It’s a beautiful, true story that manages to feel like an “Oscar movie” (for voters that care about that kind of thing—and they’re out there), but it also doesn’t remotely feel like a movie that was birthed into existence for the sake of winning Oscars (which is equally important to other voters). It’s a film about so many things—modern romance, family, tradition, multiculturalism, comedy, immigrants, healthcare, love, forgiveness, acceptance—all of which will have strong appeal to different sets of people. It stars two generations of main characters, and has intelligently written male and female leads, so it won’t be un-relatable to voters of any certain age or gender. It actually passes the Bechdel Test. For Academy members that like to make pseudo-political statements** with their votes, it offers a more pleasant, less edgy alternative to Get Out (which older voters simply may not see the appeal of). And, as far as indies go, it’s been a strong financial success, making over $40 million (and counting), against a reported $5 million budget. So voters who need to feel like they’re backing something that truly connected with audiences—and again, they’re out there—can still see The Big Sick as worthy.

**Note: As the film’s star, Kumail Nanjiani, has said, The Big Sick is only a film with a political statement if you believe “Muslims are humans” is somehow a political statement. I agree that The Big Sick doesn't even remotely have a political message. But that’s also not the point; the point is whether any members of the Academy may view supporting the film as a politicized action, regardless of how fair that is. And yes, I think some will.

Dunkirk

The only type of Oscar voter that likely won’t enjoy The Big Sick is the “steak eater,” a term coined by Anne Thompson to describe the type of AMPAS member—usually older, usually male—who wants their Best Picture pick to feel like the Best Pictures of old. Even though the Academy is rapidly changing, these are the voters who aren’t changing with it. These voters want spectacle, heroes, high-budget production craft, period settings and costumes, and proof that Hollywood actually still does make ‘em like they used to. And truly, there is nothing the steak eaters love more than a damn good war movie.

Generally speaking, when a widely acclaimed filmmaker makes a widely acclaimed WWII movie, it’s getting one of the Best Picture slots. We saw it just last year with Hacksaw Ridge, and previously with Inglourious Basterds, Saving Private Ryan, and The Thin Red Line. And remember, prior to those films, it had been at least a decade since Mel Gibson, Quentin Tarantino, and Terrence Malick had made a film that got even a single Oscar nomination, so it’s not like new work by any of them seemed like obvious Oscar bait. That’s just how strongly voters respond to good WWII movies. But Dunkirk is actually even more of a shoo-in than you might think, for two reasons.

First off, Dunkirk has been phenomenally successful on all fronts. It has both a higher Rotten Tomatoes ranking and a higher Metacritic score than all of the aforementioned WWII films, and, somehow, after only four weeks in release, it’s already made more money than all of those films except for Saving Private Ryan.

But perhaps more importantly, Dunkirk is by Christopher Nolan, who is arguably the most snubbed A-list director currently working, and nothing gets Academy blood boiling like a great “He’s due” narrative. Nolan’s nine previous films received a combined 26 Oscar nominations, but he’s never been nominated as a director. He has received three other Oscar nominations—two for Original Screenplay (for Memento and Inception), and one for producing (Inception)—but they all somehow felt like consolation prizes. Even though Inception did get a Best Picture nomination, Nolan’s films are largely viewed as having been shunned by the major categories. That will end with this year’s nominations.

Detroit

Of the films spotlighted here, Detroit is the one I feel least confident about—it’s definitely the “or four” of my “we’ve probably already seen three or four Best Picture nominees” declaration. Though it’s certainly still early, it hasn’t been a financial success yet. And perhaps more importantly, it hasn’t been without controversy. When Oscar season truly ramps up, every possible nominee gets picked apart from every possible angle, and Detroit may simply be susceptible to too many angles of scrutiny. It’s provocative in the most controversial sense—among some, it will provoke visceral, antagonistic reactions, and that’s not helpful.

But having said that, there are still several reasons Detroit could find itself among the final group of nominees. Some of them are even good reasons, so we’ll start with one of those: Kathryn Bigelow is an absolute master filmmaker, and she is at her apex. After The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty (both Best Picture nominees, with the former having won), Detroit is her third arguable-masterpiece in a row, which is an incredibly rare feat for a filmmaker (or artist of any kind, really). Awards-giving bodies have a propensity to respond to extreme hot streaks, and this certainly qualifies. And because Bigelow went (shockingly) un-nominated as a director for Zero Dark Thirty, she has the benefit of voters potentially responding to her hot streak without also feeling voter fatigue, because they’re also responding to the perception that she got screwed the last time around.

Going to the less-fair side of things in Detroit’s favor, we’re (thankfully) in an era with an added awareness of women’s opportunities, and an extremely heightened desire to spotlight women filmmakers. For voters that want to get behind a film by a woman, sadly, Detroit may be their only decent choice without feeling like they’re throwing their vote away on a film with no shot.

Lastly, and getting to the ugly side of these speculations, Detroit may pull through because it triggers a more easily recognizable type of white guilt. I think Get Out is nearly assured of a Best Picture nomination partially because of how the huge influx of black voters will support it. But I’m not sure how white voters will react to it. It might make them uncomfortable in a way that isn’t even within the comfort zone of discomfort (if that makes sense), while Detroit hits in a more obvious way that people think white guilt is supposed to feel like. For as utterly gut-wrenching as it is, Detroit is gut-wrenching in a way that people are (kind of) emotionally prepared to feel. It asks white people to think about racism in a way that they’re (more or less) used to thinking about it. Get Out doesn’t do that; it wants us to think about racism in a way that’s simply too radical and uncomfortable for a lot of people to broach.

Put simply, the older, white Academy members that voted for either The Hurt Locker or 12 Years a Slave because of what those films politically stood for—women filmmakers and non-Hollywood-ified portrayals of our racial history, respectively—may equally respond to Detroit.

*   *   *   *   *

As is true of any year, we simply don’t know what the Oscar race will even remotely look like until after the fall festivals—Telluride and Venice over Labor Day weekend, Toronto the following week, and then New York a few weeks after that. Voters always have short memories, and any or all of these four movies might drop out if the fall slate is unusually strong. At this moment, and like every August, we start to see trailers for the fall releases and think they all look incredible. But inevitably, many of them won’t be. As explained at the beginning, it’s been very hard for summer (or earlier) releases to make it into the Best Picture race. However, I think the enduring lesson of Moonlight’s win won’t merely be that last year was weird. It’ll also be that the Academy is very different now, and the old rules of what kinds of movies get Oscar attention will be less and less applicable every year.

2015 Summer Movie Recap

Hollywood released 24 major movies into the multiplexes this summer, in what feels like a perpetually bigger and more desperate attempt to make a year’s worth of money in 3 ½ months. I refer to summer as Greenlight Season, because the movies released are measured not by the amount of great reviews or awards buzz they generate, but by the number of subsequent movies that get green lit in their wake. I saw 15 of those 24 movies, missing a few because I just didn’t find the time (Terminator: Genisys, The Gift, Spy, and Magic Mike XXL), a few because I just couldn’t justify paying to see them (Vacation and Pixels), and a few because you literally couldn’t have paid me to see them (Hot Pursuit, Ted 2, and San Andreas). But I saw almost all of the major players, so let’s look at how they stacked up in terms of quality. And yes, I know that’s the most irrelevant way to measure them. That’s why it’s fun.

1.  Mad Max: Fury Road (Grade: A)

This was a summer with two all-time classic movies, and choosing which should rank number one was an agonizing task that involved switching places more than once. In the end, I opted against any illusion of objectivity and just went with what I liked better.

Any given generation typically gets just a few action movies that cause people to speak with glowing reverence forever. Die Hard. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Matrix. They don’t happen often, but Mad Max: Fury Road will be is one of those movies.

If 1981’s The Road Warrior (aka: Mad Max 2) set up the Platonic ideal of a Mad Max movie—introduce a bare bones plot in the first half about transporting something important, and then resolve that plot in a second-half-length car chase—then Fury Road is the Platonic ideal of that Platonic ideal. It spends the opening ten minutes setting up a barest bones plot about transporting something, and then gives us a gonzo hour-and-fifty-minute car chase to resolve a plot that barely registered in the first place.

The result is what feels like turning the best two minutes of a Fast & Furious movie into a two-hour post-apocalyptic acid trip covered in sand, leather, and spikes. And in a year where Furious 7 became one of the highest grossing movies ever, Fury Road was both faster and had the audacity to name its lead character Furiosa. The Fast & Furious franchise could (and will!) go another seven movies, and they still won’t create anything this perfect.

2.  Inside Out (Grade: A)

The temptation to put this number one stems not just from how good it is, but from the high likelihood that parents will watch this movie with their children (and pretend not to sob in the background) until the end times.

This is a case where accuracy of facts matters much less than accuracy of feelings. No, the innards of Inside Out probably aren’t a great facsimile of how our heads actually work, but goddamn if it doesn’t feel like the pinnacle of accuracy while you’re watching. Creating that recognition of “Yes! That’s just what that feels like!” is what peak Pixar excels at. The scene in Wall-E where he shows EVA his cool shit (Here’s my eggbeater!) is exactly what it feels like to try and impress a girl you like. The scene in Toy Story 3 where the kid gives up his toys is exactly as unfairly traumatic on the screen as it was in real life. And so it is with Inside Out, where every new brain location immediately looks emotionally recognizable yet visually brand new at the same time.

Arguing about the best Pixar movie is as useless as speculating who would win in one-on-one between LeBron and Jordan. All we know is those are the two guys that belong in the argument. With Inside Out, we know it belongs in the argument.

3.  Ant-Man (Grade: B+)

All three of this summer’s movies based on Marvel comics existed in very different final versions than their creators intended. With Ant-Man, that control feud became so untenable that original director Edgar Wright quit the project that he’d almost single-handedly shepherded into existence. Yet the strength of his vision for the film was so great, and the casting of Paul Rudd so perfect, that it succeeded in spite of itself.

One thing that Marvel does so well with their movies is allow them to be things beyond merely super-hero movies. Guardians of the Galaxy was space-opera, and Captain America: Winter Soldier felt like a ‘70s conspiracy thriller (complete with Robert Redford dutifully showing up in the cast). So it is with Ant-Man, which is essentially a heist flick with super-heroes; It’s Ocean’s ‘15, starring Ant-Man in the role of George Clooney.

We’ll probably never know what Edgar Wright’s version of Ant-Man would have looked like, or even if it would’ve been that different than eventual director Peyton Reed’s finished product. (By all accounts, Wright’s story remained fairly intact in the finished film.) But regardless of where credit is due, the resultant movie is a testament to how much fun the Marvel Cinematic Universe can continue to be even well into their “B” and “C-lists.”

4.  Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (Grade: B+)

Speaking of how much fun something can continue to be despite presumably diminishing returns, there’s 53-year old Tom Cruise, hanging off the side of a plane five minutes into yet another Mission Impossible movie. Managing to stay fresh by adopting the James Bond tactic of constantly changing directors and allowing each movie to be its own entity, while simultaneously avoiding the James Bond rut of mandating each movie follow the same story beats, the Mission Impossible franchise has found a sweet spot that should theoretically last as long as Tom Cruise can walk and remains crazy enough to do his own stunts. And Tom’s craziness level isn’t going down.

5.  Straight Outta Compton (Grade: B)

Ever since I heard Grantland’s Wesley Morris refer to this as “The hip-hop Avengers,” I haven’t been able to get that perfect metaphor out of my head. Like The Avengers, this is all about mythologizing a gathering of heroes. In that regard, it succeeds perfectly. But it’s also a slight disservice, because these were real people, and the relevancy of this story deserved to be told in a more authentic way.

I remember last summer having a conversation with a friend about the James Brown biopic, Get On Up, and how he didn’t want to see it because it was PG-13, and “James Brown didn’t live a PG-13 life.” Despite the limiting rating, Get On Up still figured out how to show James Brown’s life and character in a way that felt true. Straight Outta Compton got the R rating it needed (a single playing of “Fuck tha Police” ensured that), but it somehow ended up the more sugar-coated and neutered of the two movies, pretending that Dr. Dre speeding in a Ferrari was the most controversial thing he ever did.

Those omissions for the sake of commercial safety (or worse, saving face) are so frustrating partially because the movie is otherwise so good. It’s compulsively watchable, doesn’t drag despite it’s two-and-a-half hour runtime, and has a few moments of true greatness. (On the other hand, there are also a few moments that feel like outtakes from the Entourage movie.) If it just cared a bit more about reality than myth building, it could have been the best music biopic ever.

6.  Trainwreck (Grade: B)

This was the summer’s funniest movie—and probably the funniest summer movie since Bridesmaids in 2011—but it doesn’t stand up very well to actual analysis. The elephant in the room with the movie is that the two main characters seem to only be interested in each other because the plot needs them to be. Schumer apparently only likes Hader because he calls her back, and he seemingly only likes her because she put out on the first date. In a way, this is a minor complaint, because most comedies construct vaguely outlandish plots merely as joke delivery systems, but the real problem here is that it’s one of those core parts that shouldn’t have to be outlandish. Their relationship isn’t a set piece; it’s the whole piece.

Beyond that, the movie’s an 80/20 mix of hilarious scenes and scenes that fall completely flat. Sadly, the bad scenes are so bad that they kind of dominate your memory and make it feel more like a 60/40 ratio. The intervention scene with Marv Albert is terrible, and the idea that LeBron plays one-on-one with his doctor only makes sense if you also believe Usain Bolt races his dentist or Ronda Rousey spars with her gardener.

Now, having said all that, what works here (and it mostly does work) is really, really good, and the movie absolutely succeeded in its three most important goals: 1) It launched Amy Schumer to true stardom (regardless of whether she’s hot enough). 2) It revitalized the directing career of Judd Apatow after two very forgettable movies (Funny People and This is 40). And 3) It became the defining comedy of 2015.

7.  The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Grade: B)

This was actually a really fun spy movie, so it’s unfortunate that no one saw it. But unfortunate and unexpected aren’t the same thing. It’s really unclear what Warner Brothers was thinking here. How many current moviegoers have even heard of this property, let alone were pining for its revival? Other than knowing “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” was a ‘60s spy show, I know nothing about it, and I imagine most people know even less than that. What’s even more curious is that the concept, whatever it actually is, is never even used or mentioned in the movie until the final line of dialogue. I saw the movie, and I still couldn’t tell you what the property is. So Warner Brothers essentially paid royalty rights for a title and intellectual property that they didn’t really use, and which actively caused fewer people to see their movie. Really, if you just cut that final line, the movie could have been named Mission Impossible: First Class (Or Mission Impossible: Episode I, Mission Impossible Begins, etc.), and it would have made three times as much money.

Anyway, I recommend people check this out, as it is actually quite fun. Like most of Guy Ritchie’s films, the editing is tremendously exciting and the set pieces are wonderfully conceived, including a really cool climactic raid sequence shot almost entirely in moving and alternating split screens. Henry Cavill plays a better Clark Kent here than he did in Man of Steel, Armie Hammer is surprisingly agile with a Russian accent, and Alicia Vikander continues her title-streak of being the most beautiful person to grace a movie screen. Try and see this if you get a chance, because we’re definitely not getting a sequel.

8.  Jurassic World (Grade: B-)

The middle of the list seems like the right place for a movie that financially conquered the season, but artistically fought against its own existence. I actually quite admire the ballsiness of the anti-studio-thinking approach that writer/director Collin Trevorrow took to the material. He was being asked to make a movie that’s only reason for existence was so a mega-corporation could make a lot of money, so he made a movie about a mega-corporation creating something they shouldn’t have just so they could make a lot of money. Good form.

But just because you’ve been highly successful at arguing why you made something that shouldn’t exist, that doesn’t mean you won the argument. It might actually mean the opposite.

To be fair, debate about how many summer movies have legitimate reason to exist is a depressing path that takes the piss right out of all these things, so let’s try and grade on a curve. This movie was fun. It wasn’t as much fun as the best of the crop, but it was much more fun than most of them. Chris Pratt loudly ended the skepticism that he’s a movie star, the dialogue and story beats were more or less engaging, and it was at least marginally closer in quality to Jurassic Park than it was to Jurassic park III. That’s probably all we could ask for.

9.  Avengers: Age of Ultron (Grade: B-)

A few months back, writer Mark Harris questioned whether shared universe comic book movies—after they check all of the fan-service boxes and include Easter eggs, post-credit scenes, and set-up the next several installments—even have the time and ability to be movies at all. By and large, I don’t agree that this is a major problem, as I think movies like Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy have shown. But Avengers: Age of Ultron sure as hell made it feel like Harris’ theory is a full-blown epidemic.

Somewhere within everything was an actual Joss Whedon movie, and at times it resembled a very good one. The sequence with Hawkeye’s wife at their ranch (“You know I’ve always supported your avenging”), much of the snappy patter, and the basic Ultron plot all worked immensely well. But all of that was nearly drowned out by everything Marvel demanded be thrown in on top. A long sequence in the middle with Thor and a magic pond (it’s just as good as it sounds!) is exclusively there to set up future installments and completely distracts from the movie’s narrative, while a long set piece with Iron Man and the Hulk duking it out in an eastern European city isn’t just CGI porn, it’s a full-on fanboy gangbang.

Because of all the obvious “one scene for you, one scene for me” garbage going on between Whedon and Marvel, the most memorable moment of the movie ended up being a not-so-subtle bit of Whedon knocking the business model. In pointing out that Natalie Portman and Gwenyth Paltrow’s characters aren’t present for a party scene (or in the movie at all), Whedon is basically telling us Marvel wouldn’t pay their salaries to get them there. This problem will only get worse.

10.  Tomorrowland (Grade: C)

The most gratuitous violence of the summer movie season was the degree that Tomorrowland tried to bludgeon its message into our collective heads. Had the whole “Don’t lose your sense of wonder” message been deployed subtly, Tomorrowland had the capacity to be a very good movie. It absolutely nailed the wonder part, the production design was gorgeous and imaginative, and the dialogue had a Pixar-y snap to it. But good God, this movie needed to get off its soapbox.

It’ll be interesting to see where Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) goes from here, as this is really his first career misstep. Part of me hopes he takes on a super-hero movie now that this unmitigated financial failure might make it difficult to get funding for his passion projects. That same sense of wonder that got him in trouble here could just kill it in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But after that system chewed up and spit out Joss Whedon and Edgar Wright earlier this year, I wouldn’t feel right wishing it upon someone so talented. We’ll see what happens next.

11.  Pitch Perfect 2 (Grade: C-)

Pitch Perfect 2 is to Pitch Perfect as Season 8 of How I Met Your Mother is to Season 1. Instead of bothering with several years of diminishing returns while the characters gradually become nothing more than caricatures of themselves, this franchise just took us there overnight.

As with Avengers: Age of Ultron, this hits all of the beats the fans wanted, but without any illusion of there being something more. It’s Pitch Perfect fan fiction.

12.  Minions (Grade: C-)

This is, without a doubt, the worst missed opportunity of the summer. Minions should have been great, but Universal and its creators apparently took the “people will come anyway” approach, and mailed it in. The term “All Ages” is frequently a misnomer. Minions is not an All Ages movie, it’s a kids movie. Perhaps we should have known that going in, but I really believed we’d be getting a Simpsons/Pixar-like movie that truly was All Ages, which adults and children could enjoy alike. That did not happen. What we got was 90 minutes of three funny looking yellow blobs speaking in funny gibberish. If there was a third joke, I missed it. Also, I fell asleep. Also, I wasn’t tired.

13.  Fantastic Four (Grade: D+)

Fantastic Four actually wasn’t as irredeemable as the critics made it out to be. Yes, it was awful, but if you squinted, you could see the vague blueprint of a decent movie. I still maintain the casting was good, and the decision to focus more on the appetite for wonder was also a wise one. The problem is that this specific version of wonder was languidly non-wondrous. I wish Tomorrowland—a movie which nailed the wonder but little else—could have somehow been combined with Fantastic Four. Then we might have had something. Instead, we got the loud death cry of a possible franchise, which (I guess) was interesting in its own right.

14.  Aloha (Grade: D)

I’d love to call this a train-wreck, but that implies you’d feel compelled to look. It was more like a tricycle crash that made no sound whatsoever. There are fleeting bits that remind you Cameron Crowe can write a great line, or even a great moment of human connection. But those moments have to be grounded in plot and character to have any resonance, and there’s no such thing here. Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone are two of the most charismatic actors on the planet right now. That even they can’t sell this material says all you need to know about how bad it is.

15.  Entourage (Grade: F--)

If Pitch Perfect 2 was like the 8^th season of How I Met Your Mother, then Entourage was like the 18^th season, which thank Christ we never actually got. There’s just nothing good to be said here.