Neil Gaiman who wrote the source material must be proud. On earth she is hunted by a witch (a scenery chewing Michelle Pfeiffer) and aided by pirates with a flying ship (including a jovial Robert De Niro as their captain), but at the end of the day this is a bucolic romance between two loners who learn to let people in while their storytellers indulges in some old-fashioned swashbuckling fun. But like those movies, this is also a love letter to a classical kind of all-ages adventure that rarely gets made anymore.Īs soft of a 21st century version of The Princess Bride, Stardust is a sweet but rousing yarn about Tristan (Charlie Cox), an errand boy in provincial early 20th century England, and Yvaine (Claire Danes), an honest to goodness star who’s fallen from the celestial heavens and arrived in human form. To be sure, the screenplay by Vaughn and frequent collaborator Jane Goldman has the same subversive playfulness that marks all of their genre efforts, from Kick-Ass to Kingsman. Underappreciated in its original theatrical run, director Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust has developed a strong cult following because of its blissful and pure-hearted sense of storybook fantasy. We begin this list with one of the more underrated films to hit theaters during the dog days of summer. We know Hollywood has increasingly pushed their “summer tentpoles” to April in the last few years, but those of us who live in the midwest and northeast can attest that April is NOT summer. *Editor’s Note: We’ve decided to count only films released between the months of May and August as summer movies.
#WATCH THE KARATE KID FREE MOVIES MOVIE#
So in honor of the arrival of beach season, our staff and readers have put their heads together and voted on what are the best summer movie events, be they spectacle thrills or terrifying chills, that kept us entertained at the multiplex over the last 15 years. It needs to be a film the audience responds to passionately, and it needs to be a shared experience that got folks to vanish into another world-or at least a gripping story set in our own-for a precious few hours. While being able to define what a “summer movie” is can be difficult, much like the Supreme Court’s ability to sniff out obscenity, we know it when we see it. For almost everyone, however, summer has also long meant a chance to disappear into the fantasies of their local cinema for a few hours, preferably with ice-cold air conditioning cranked all the way up. For some it might mean the smell of barbecue and a cold beverage for others it could be an escape into the wilds of a sun-kissed coast or a rolling hiking trail. For every person, that joy can be different too. Like a blast of chlorine water on the first day the pool’s open, the joys of summer come fast and sudden.