The 24 best movies of the summer, according to critics

Critic score: 98%

Audience score: 89%

Summary: "Pakistan-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani and grad student Emily Gardner fall in love but struggle as their cultures clash. When Emily contracts a mysterious illness, Kumail finds himself forced to face her feisty parents, his family's expectations, and his true feelings."

What critics said: "Comic Kumail Nanjiani and his wife/co-screenwriter Emily V. Gordon carve this heartfelt love story out of her health crisis and their own culture-clash relationship. Not just the funniest romcom in ages, it's one of 2017's best films." — Rolling Stone

Critic score: 94%

Audience score: 89%

Summary: "After being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver finds himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail."

What critics said: "As sharply executed as a hairpin turn, Baby Driver is a crackling-good ride, one that organically weaves music and humor into a slick showcase for its cast." — CNN

Critic score: 93%

Audience score: 82%

Summary: "Allied soldiers from Belgium, the British Empire and France are surrounded by the German army and evacuated during a fierce battle in World War II."

What critics said: "It's at once minimalist and maximalist, cynical and dopey, a big-boy white elephant art film that is actually a lean and mean suspense set-piece machine." — The AV Club

Critic score: 93%

Audience score: 86%

Summary: "After the apes suffer unimaginable losses, Caesar wrestles with his darker instincts and begins his own mythic quest to avenge his kind."

What critics said: "A consistently intelligent, morally thoughtful and often beautiful picture." — Newsweek

Critic score: 93%

Audience score: 77%

Summary: "Two brothers attempt to pull off a heist during a NASCAR race in North Carolina."

What critics said: "Great fun and one of the most purely entertaining movies of the year." — Chicago Sun-Times

Critic score: 92%

Audience score: 90%

Summary: "Before she was Wonder Woman, she was Diana, princess of the Amazons, trained warrior. When a pilot crashes and tells of conflict in the outside world, she leaves home to fight a war, discovering her full powers and true destiny."

What critics said: "A cut above nearly all the superhero movies that have been trotted out over the past few summers." — Time

Critic score: 92%

Audience score: 90%

Summary: "Peter Parker tries to balance his life as an ordinary high school student in Queens with his superhero alter-ego Spider-Man, and must confront a new menace prowling the skies of New York City."

What critics said: "Even those of us who regard the Marvel aesthetic as a plague on world cinema can find much in Spider-Man: Homecoming to be charmed by." — Vulture

Critic score: 92%

Audience score: 69%

Summary: "In this singular exploration of legacy, love, loss, and the enormity of existence, a recently deceased, white-sheeted ghost returns to his suburban home to try to reconnect with his bereft wife."

What critics said: "Just when you think you've cracked the film's circumscribed logic, it opens up and goes wild in ways at once too wondrous and too preposterous to spoil." — The New York Times

Critic score: 91%

Audience score: 88%

Summary: "When a group of Burmese refugees join the congregation, the pastor of a failing Anglican church attempts to aid them by planting crops and enlisting the help of the community."

What critics said: "Steve Gomer's fine fact-based, faith-based film showcases a career-highlight performance by John Corbett." — Variety

Critic score: 89%

Audience score: 86%

Summary: "When four lifelong friends travel to New Orleans for the annual Essence Festival, sisterhoods are rekindled, wild sides are rediscovered."

What critics said: "The ladies-on-the-loose comedy that everyone needs right now, even if they don't know it yet." — RogerEbert.com

Critic score: 88%

Audience score: 45%

Summary: "Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son. Then a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge."

What critics said: "An effectively creepy and at times gut-wrenching take on the pandemic genre." — Newsday

Critic score: 88%

Audience score: 74%

Summary: "In 19th-century rural England, a young bride who has been sold into marriage discovers an unstoppable desire within herself as she enters into an affair with a worker on her estate."

What critics said: "Pugh and the film around her hold an audience transfixed and conflicted to the end." — Boston Globe

Critic score: 88%

Audience score: 83%

Summary: "A bank robber finds himself unable to evade his pursuers."

What critics said: "It marks a major stride forward, at once sure-footed in its method and destabilizing in its effect." — The New Yorker

Critic score: 88%

Audience score: 78%

Summary: "An unhinged social media stalker moves to LA and insinuates herself into the life of an Instagram star."

What critics said: "'Ingrid Goes West' is a sharp, insightful modern day stalker fantasy, 'Single White Female' through a Valencia Instagram filter." — Detroit News

Critic score: 87%

Audience score: 64%

Summary: "Two overly imaginative pranksters named George and Harold hypnotize their principal into thinking he's a ridiculously enthusiastic, incredibly dimwitted superhero named Captain Underpants."

What critics said: "It's a bird! it's a plane! It's a kids' movie that won't make grownups want to manually remove their own toenails!" — Entertainment Weekly

Critic score: 86%

Audience score: 93%

Summary: "An FBI agent teams with a town's veteran game tracker to investigate a murder that occurred on a Native American reservation."

What critics said: "[Taylor] Sheridan paints a searing picture of life on society's margins - people who live with 'silence and snow' and not much else." — NPR

Critic score: 85%

Audience score: 83%

Summary: "Meet Mija, a young girl who risks everything to prevent a powerful, multi-national company from kidnapping her best friend - a fascinating animal named Okja."

What critics said: "It's a sublime tale of the value of humanity, and the horrors we often have to suffer through to hold on to that." — The Atlantic

Critic score: 84%

Audience score: 84%

Summary: "Based on the true life story of a young Marine corporal whose unique discipline and bond with her military combat dog saved many lives during their deployment in Iraq."

What critics said: "Kate Mara is raw and riveting in the title role, a marine who ends up in combat in Iraq with a bomb-sniffing German shepherd." — Rolling Stone

Critic score: 82%

Audience score: 89%

Summary: "The Guardians must fight to keep their newfound family together as they unravel the mystery of Peter Quill's true parentage."

What critics said: "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a toe-tapping, eye-popping indication that summer is here, and that it might not suck after all." — The Washington Post

Critic score: 82%

Audience score: 80%

Summary: "Amidst the chaos of the Detroit Rebellion, with the city under curfew and as the Michigan National Guard patrolled the streets, three young African American men were murdered at the Algiers Motel."

What critics said: "A drama as powerful as it is timely." — Variety

Critic score: 79%

Audience score: 52%

Summary: "The unexpected arrival of a wounded Union soldier at a girls' school in Virginia during the American Civil War leads to jealousy and betrayal."

What critics said: "Modest in scale yet rousing in Southern Gothic psychodrama, Sofia Coppola's 'The Beguiled' creates levels of excitement that bigger, longer, louder blockbusters can't match." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

Critic score: 79%

Audience score: 91%

Summary: "Brigsby Bear Adventures is a children's TV show produced for an audience of one: James. When the show abruptly ends, James's life changes forever, and he sets out to finish the story himself."

What critics said: "Scrappy and modest though [the] movie may be, it all coheres beautifully, and with a sweetness that never feels faked." — Los Angeles Times

Critic score: 78%

Audience score: 48%

Summary: "A decade after 'An Inconvenient Truth' (2006) brought climate change into the heart of popular culture comes the follow-up that shows just how close we are to a real energy revolution."

What critics said: "In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore." — The New York Times

Critic score: 77%

Audience score: 67%

Summary: "An ailing movie star comes to terms with his past and mortality."

What critics said: "You will almost assuredly leave The Hero knowing that [Sam Elliott] is a bona fide national treasure." — Rolling Stone