It’s the last full week in August, but just before Summer Madness segues into Fall Folly, we thought we’d have a go investigating a claim we’ve been hearing asserted with some frequency: that Summer 2017 is one of the best blockbuster seasons in recent memory. We decided to pit it against the 17 other summer seasons this century (yes, pedants, we count the year 2000) to see how it stacks up.

Of course, the several-billion dollar questions are: how do we define “Summer Season” and how to we define the kind of films we want to focus on?

Continue reading The Best Blockbuster Summers Of the Century So Far at The Playlist.

One of the most iconic stars of action cinema this century returns to the big screen this week, as Matt Damon gets back in his old shoes as Jason Bourne in, well, “Jason Bourne,” his fourth time playing the forgetful super-spy since 2002’s “The Bourne Identity.” And few action stars are as important to the genre as Damon and his creation.

As we entered the new millennium, action movies were still in the Bruckheimer years, a time of endless “Die Hard” rip-offs, where aging muscleheads were continuing to crank out movies to increasingly diminishing returns.

Continue reading The 50 Best Action Movies Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

It’s impossible for us to choose a single favorite genre from the wealth that cinema offers. But if some sort of “Sophie’s Choice” situation were to occur, we probably would be able to point to one that occupies a more central place in our hearts: science fiction. The term encompasses multitudes: sci-fi runs the gamut from stark, philosophical inquiry to space western to brainless robot-go-bang-bang; it hybridizes beautifully with other genres like comedy, horror and romance and as such is maybe the most expansive and elastic genre of them all.

Continue reading The 50 Best Sci-Fi Films Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

It’s sort of remarkable, the ways that animation on the big screen has changed in the past two decades or so. In the early ’90s, the game was pretty much entirely owned by Disney’s hand-drawn animated fairy tales, which were hugely successful but almost entirely seen as kids’ stuff, with the occasional Don Bluth or Ralph Bakshi effort winning some eyes but not really competing; and the beginning of an interesting scene in Japan that largely failed to crossover to mainstream audiences stateside.

Continue reading The 50 Best Animated Films Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

Many moons ago, when The Playlist first began, we had a special interest in the place where movies and music met. We’ve long since expanded our interests to all manner of movies, and more recently TV, but it’s an area that we’ve always kept tabs on, from reporting the latest news as such to our annual Best Soundtracks Of The Year post.

The 50 Best Film Scores Of The 21st Century So Far

We’re no longer in the golden days of the soundtrack of the 1980s and 1990s.

Continue reading The 25 Best Movie Soundtracks Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

Aside from the brief craze in the 1980s when “Krull” and “Conan” and the like roamed theaters, fantasy had never been a particularly popular genre for filmmakers to tackle —principally because it was too expensive, and also because too few filmmakers took it seriously. But that changed at the start of this century, as the “Harry Potter” and “Lord Of The Rings” films more or less took over Hollywood.

Continue reading The 20 Best Fantasy Films Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

We’re in the heart of the summer movie season, and that means theaters are mostly catering to things with superheroes or orcs or angry birds or more superheroes or ninja turtles. And that’s all well and good, but it can leave a film fan with a broader, more varied appetite a little starved, particularly when it comes to foreign-language fare.

READ MORE: The 50 Best Animated Films Of The 21st Century So Far

While there’s plenty of great arthouse and indie films in release (go see “The Lobster” and “Love & Friendship,” people!), there are relatively few truly tantalizing subtitled films on offer.

Continue reading The 50 Best Foreign Language Movies Of the 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

As kids, we looked ahead to the imminent 21st century and thought of a big bold, sci-fi future. The robot butler and trips to the drug store in hovercars version hasn’t yet arrived, but the first 15 years of this century have been extremely fruitful for big-screen science fiction.

Sci-fi is almost as old as cinema itself —1902’s Georges Méliès’ “A Trip To The Moon” is generally seen as the first example— but it became hugely popular in late 20th century filmmaking in the aftermath of “Star Wars,” if also somewhat watered down.

Continue reading The 25 Best Sci-Fi Films Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.

By the pricking of my thumbs, a holiday-themed list feature this way comes. Yep, All Hallow’s Eve is almost upon us, and while the temptation to do some kind of “Before I Go To Sleep“-themed feature was a great one, we thought we should put together something appropriately spooky to get you in the mood for tomorrow night’s festivities.

So, during a break from making our costumes for the annual Playlist Halloween party (popular choices this year: the Babadook, Kevin Feige, Alexander from “Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” box-office receipts for “Sin City 2,” a GamerGater), we’ve been considering the state of recent horror.

Continue reading The 25 Best Horror Films Of The 21st Century So Far at The Playlist.