Diamonds in the multiplex rough: 13 great Hollywood movies from the dog days of August

Late August is usually a dumping ground for bad Hollywood movies, but these films begged to differ

By Gwen Ihnat, A.A. Dowd, Cameron Scheetz, Alex McLevy, Laura Adamczyk, Katie Rife, William Hughes | September 6, 2021 | 5:00am

Film Features Michael Mann

Diamonds in the multiplex rough: 13 great Hollywood movies from the dog days of August

Background image: Barton Fink (Screenshot). From left: The Fly, Married To The Mob, An American Werewolf in London (Screenshots) Graphic: Allison Corr

And yet, every once in a while, a genuinely terrific studio movie crops up during this period of box-office poison, going on to accrue the status of a classic. What follows are 13 great Hollywood films released after 1975, all of which opened in theaters just before Labor Day in their respective years, bringing unexpected quality to the junkyard of late summer.

Apocalypse Now

Prestige movies usually come out in the autumn, the better to position themselves in the award-season conversation. The biggest blockbusters are often released in early summer, to help fill the needs of idle moviegoers ready to kill some time with fights, chases, and huge explosions. In between these two lucrative periods on the movie calendar lies a dead zone maybe even more barren than the frigid wasteland of January: the final couple of weeks of August. Historically speaking, Hollywood treats this stretch of dates like a dumping ground for projects that are neither likely hits nor prospective awards contenders. They are the forgotten, the unwanted, the filler indifferently released into theaters nationwide with the near certainty that America will choose one final gasp of beach time over whatever they offer.And yet, every once in a while, a genuinely terrific studio movie crops up during this period of box-office poison, going on to accrue the status of a classic. What follows are 13 great Hollywood films released after 1975, all of which opened in theaters just before Labor Day in their respective years, bringing unexpected quality to the junkyard of late summer.

Apocalypse Now (August 15, 1979)

Transporting Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness to the jungles of the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now was an almost unprecedented boondoggle of a Hollywood production. Financial and casting setbacks gave way to an infamously hellish shoot in the Philippines plagued by destructive weather, medical emergencies, and an overweight, under-prepared Marlon Brando. Massively off schedule and over budget, the film eventually entered the fresh purgatory of the editing booth, blowing past multiple release dates (and through multiple cuts) as director Francis Ford Coppola and several editors struggled to find a coherent movie in a million feet of footage. Against all odds—and despite what some of the contemporaneous reviews insisted—they wildly succeeded, pulling a masterpiece from the rubble. Apocalypse Now remains one of the medium’s towering visions of war, a woozy nightmare odyssey whose growing pains are right up there on screen, fortifying the film’s portrait of madness, desperation, and the horror, the horror. [A.A. Dowd]

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An American Werewolf In London (August 21, 1981)

Animal House and The Blues Brothers handily proved that John Landis could make a hit comedy. It was his ambition to mix laughs with scares—as he had in his low-budget directorial debut Schlock—that spooked investors; “too frightening to be a comedy, too funny to be a horror movie,” they said in so many words of his script, about a young American who gets bitten by something big and hairy while backpacking across the moors of England. Of course, it’s the rather seamless blend of those genres that makes An American Werewolf In London a classic of both. The centerpiece transformation, whose groundbreaking effects won the movie an Oscar, is basically a microcosm for the tricky tonal gymnastics: It goes from hilarious to horrifying and back again as poor David wolfs out, his painful ordeal mirroring the way this horny collegiate romp of the National Lampoon variety is rudely, periodically interrupted by a genuinely effective creature feature. [A.A. Dowd]

(August 28, 1981)

There’s overnight success, and then there’s launching your career with two of the of all time. Cowriting consecutive Harrison Ford blockbusters afforded Lawrence Kasdan the clout to make a very different kind of summer movie, seasonally appropriate less in escapist thrills than sweltering erotic atmosphere and balmy setting. Released just two months after Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Kasdan’s directorial debut is essentially a modern , with William Hurt as a none-too-bright South Florida lawyer who gets mixed up in the schemes of a femme fatale (Kathleen Turner, in the va-va-voom role that propelled her to stardom). Body Heat updated the 1940s noir for a new age of less suggestive, more sexually explicit studio entertainment. But it also brought some old-school, adult-courting class—and fiendishly clever plot machinations—to what had become, by 1981, Hollywood’s designated season for kids and kids of all ages. [A.A. Dowd]

(August 13, 1982)

The pre-back-to-school timing of Fast Times’ release worked out beautifully with its premise: The movie kicks off with the first day of class at Ridgemont High, then progresses through the school year. The sleeper, directed by Amy Heckerling and based on a book by Cameron Crowe, boasted no stars (though plenty of its cast, like Sean Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, would become that) and also not much of a plot dictating the movements of teenager characters like hard-working Brad (Judge Reinhold), hustling Damone (Robert Romanus), curious Stacey (Jason Leigh), and the ultimate stoner surfer dude, Spicoli (Penn). Years before films like Sixteen Candles, , and, the success of Fast Times proved that there was a market for teens who wanted to see realistic (but entertaining) depictions of themselves up on the big screen. Made for a measly $5 million, the movie earned several times that at the box office. The John Hughes era followed, but his glossy portrayals lacked the heart of the down-to-earth students of Fast Times. [Gwen Ihnat]

(August 15, 1984)

W.D. Richter and Earl Mac Rauch’s messy, endlessly enthusiastic sci-fi throwback Buckaroo Banzai was probably doomed to cult status from the start: too weird, too hard to market, too released-into-theaters-while-Ghostbusters-was-still-devouring-people’s-genre-movie-ticket-money. But that same deliberate iconoclasm (steeped in Rauch’s love of 1970s weirdo spectaculars, with a bit of Doc Samson tossed in for Peter Weller’s polymathic title role) has also ensured the film’s endurance. There’s just nothing quite like Buckaroo Banzai, a movie that asks you to accept that Jeff Goldblum’s fuzzy-pantsed cowboy costume, John Lithgow’s outrageous “Italian” accent, and especially Weller’s detached but empathetic deadpan are the ultimate in retro cool—and manages, its own endearingly bow-tied, dorky way, to land that unlikely pitch. The fact that it also features one of the top contenders for the best end credits sequences of all time is just icing on the interdimensional cake. [William Hughes]

(August 15, 1986)

A long day in the sweltering August sun can leave you feeling not like yourself. But even at your heat-stroke worst, you’ll be in better shape than Jeff Goldblum in what is far and away the grossest thing he’s ever done—and grosser than the worst most others have to offer, as well. David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly remains a high-water mark for disturbing special effects and all-around ickiness. Goldblum plays Seth Brundle, a scientist who’s invented a teleportation device, who, in the midst of courting journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) decides to conduct the final experiment of teleporting himself, only for a housefly to get trapped in the transfer chamber with him. The Fly has seeped into the pop-culture firmament at this point, so you probably know roughly how it goes for Brundle, but that doesn’t make watching the slow-moving disaster any less nauseatingly gripping. [Alex McLevy]

(August 15, 1986)

Cinephiles had an unexpected abundance of riches on their hands on August 15, 1986, when both The Fly and this very different breed of thriller hit theaters. But while Cronenberg’s movie possesses one of the most iconic creatures in horror history, Manhunter might unleash the bigger monster. That would be Thomas Harris’ infamous, flesh-eating serial killer Hannibal Lecter—or Lecktor, as he’s slightly, oddly renamed for his first onscreen portrayal in this adaptation of the novelist’s Red Dragon. Brian Cox’s take on the villain is almost lackadaisical compared to Anthony Hopkins’ later scenery-chewing, Oscar-winning performance. But this earlier Lecter(tor) is almost more unsettling, developing an uncomfortable intimacy with FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen). Beyond that central creep-put turn, Michael Mann’s procedural is a master class of meticulous composition, of big 1980s colors and elaborately symmetrical mise-en-scéne. [Alex McLevy]

(August 19, 1988)

A few years after he made Something Wild (and a few years before ), Jonathan Demme went for another strait-laced-guy-meets-unconventional-girl rom-com with the organized crime comedy Married To The Mob. Angela (Michelle Pfeiffer) grabs her son and flees her big-haired, heavily accessoried community in Jersey for New York City after her adulterous mobster husband (Alec Baldwin) is killed, but her faux Mafia family proves difficult to shake. Matthew Modine is the bland FBI agent who wants to use her to take this branch of the mob down, and of course ends up falling for her. But the two headliners are easily outshone by Married To The Mob’s exemplary supporting players. Dean Stockwell scored his sole Oscar nomination for his funny work as simultaneously seductive and menacing crime boss Tony The Tiger. And Mercedes Ruehl runs away with the whole thing as Tony’s wife Connie, who becomes increasingly unhinged by her husband’s obsession with Angela, berserkly toppling from her Mafia-queen perch. [Gwen Ihnat]

(August 17, 1990)

If you’re stepping into a darkened auditorium playing Wild At Heart in hopes of escaping the heat, then you’re in the wrong place. Opening with the literal strike of a match, this movie’s more scorching than the sun-baked belly of a dead lizard on the side of a Texas highway, burning with raw physicality and hellish depravity. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern develop a red-hot chemistry as Sailor and Lula, romantic Southern rebels ignited by passion: The scene where they flail and flex to power metal before Cage grabs the mic and serenades Dern with Elvis’ “Love Me” is a monument to individuality and the belief in personal freedom. But don’t take your eyes off the road, because in Lynch’s twisted take on The Wizard Of Oz, madness is never far behind. Did we mention a terrifying Willem Dafoe as the sadistic Bobby Peru, one of Lynch’s most indelible villains? The French loved Wild At Heart, awarding it the top prize at Cannes in May 1990. As so often happens with Lynch’s work, it took a while for the rest of the world to catch up. [Katie Rife]

Barton Fink (August 21, 1991)

It’s difficult to concentrate when it’s hot. Or when you’re being tortured by mosquitoes. Or when you’re a social realist playwright slumming it in B-pictures who’s experiencing profound disillusionment and quite possibly a psychotic break. Although its more Kafkaesque qualities ultimately render it unclassifiable, the argument for Barton Fink as a postmodern neo-noir is bolstered by all the shiny foreheads and sweat-stained undershirts in Joel and Ethan Coen’s first foray into the Golden Age of Hollywood. (Neo-noir is a sweaty genre.) Significantly bleaker than the Coen’s later , Barton Fink is a wonderfully shot and darkly funny movie about the creative process that confounded the mainstream in 1991 but has gone on to become one of the brothers’ most celebrated films. Like Wild At Heart the year before, it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in May, and hit American screens in late August. Unlike Wild At Heart, it only opened in a handful of theaters and flopped hard at the box office. So goes the life of the mind. [Katie Rife]

(August 17, 2007)

As in many great teen movies before and after it, the end of the school year looms over. There’s one last party, and one last chance to make it all count. Best buds Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) follow in the footsteps of their horny cinematic ancestors and scheme to lose their virginities before graduation. That the Judd Apatow-produced comedy hit theaters in mid-August—when most students were busy with back-to-school shopping—only adds to the feeling that Superbad is a film stuck out of time, which helped crystallize it as a classic of its genre. That was intentional, with the throwback soundtrack, Seth and Evan’s thrifted wardrobes, and the lack of millennial teen lingo contributing to Superbad’s cross-generational nostalgia. As Seth, Evan, and Fogell/McLovin quibble about college and how to score some booze, the R-rated raunch-fest reveals itself to be a sweet buddy comedy with an eye on the future. Boasting a now all-star ensemble—further cementing the ascent of Cera, Hill, Seth Rogen, Bill Hader, and Emma Stone in her film debut—Superbad remains top of the class. [Cameron Scheetz]

(August 21, 2009)

Considering the number of Oscar nominations it would eventually garner (including a Best Picture nod), looks peculiarly placed in retrospect as a late-summer release. But Quentin Tarantino’s previous effort, Death Proof (paired with his buddy Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror in the), sputtered in cinemas, and the spaghetti-western-meets-WWII flick must’ve felt like a tough sell for moviegoers. So the fact that Basterds—intentional misspelling and all—set the box office aflame, netting Tarantino his highest theatrical gross at the time, came as a surprise. Perhaps it was the allure of Brad Pitt, hamming it up off the heels of , or maybe audiences were just hungry for something original after another summer of Transformers and Harry Potter. Over a decade later, the film only looks more “glourious,” telling its sprawling story through an idiosyncratic five-chapter structure that allows it to breathe. Thanks to Inglourious Basterds’ runaway success, the Tarantino. [Cameron Scheetz]

(August 18, 2017)

Steven Soderbergh’s 2017 comeback is a shaggier heist film than his Ocean’s entries—a half hour of Logan Lucky could be lost without much disruption—but mid-August isn’t the worst time to hang out in movie theater air conditioning with the likes of Channing Tatum and Adam Driver, who here make oddly convincing brothers looking to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway. On its surface, Logan Lucky appears merely like an excuse to get together a bunch of very famous actors for some fun with Southern accents. But woven within all the trucker hats and games of toilet seat horseshoes is a sweet story of family and working-class people trying to make ends meet. Plus, it’s hard not like a movie when everyone on screen seems to be having such a good time. [Laura Adamczyk]