Critics reveal their summer blockbuster favorites

Dolly!” like the Radio Raheem of lonely bliss.

One day — it’s rarely night — a spaceship deposits a sleek, white pod — an EVE — whom Wall-E would like to make his waltz partner. But she’s all laser-blasts and business speak. “Directive?” Eve asks, like one of those consulting-firm automatons. Her mission ends with blunt efficiency that lets the people who made this movie concoct a stretch of hilariously desperate physical comedy. Sleep mode does little to diminish her resistance to his romance.

“Wall-E” is an ecologist’s lament with Buster Keaton’s chops. This banged-up machine cares more for the planet than we apparently did. (The movie might be too ready to return us to the bright side.)

Really. This is a movie that knows its bible. Not just the way Eve looks like something Apple made but also its wariness of false idolatry. “Wall-E” opened in summer 2008, before the iPad, when Twitter was just becoming a thing, as the country was mired in another year of double war, as presidential primaries were barbed back when “barbed” seemed like the worst that things could get. “The Dark Knight” would arrive the following month and capture the mood with on-the-nose bleakness. In the meantime, there was a comedy about a box who worships a pod and people who worship electronic distraction above all else, so much that the dozens of human babies that go sloshing around this movie have always blown my mind. How’d their parents get those Sunday clothes

When “The Avengers” came out in 2012, it occupied a paradoxical position. Though other such films had landed, it was the start of the supersized superhero film, the intersection of various hero worlds, and it was the effective beginning of the blockbuster goliath that continues growing: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the film also signaled the end of more streamlined narratives and engagement with character development. It heralded a commitment to the franchise over individual properties.

“The Avengers” strikes the perfect balance between highstakes action and pitch-perfect comedy — chemistry that the sequels would fail to emulate.

The film was a showcase for director-screenwriter Joss Whedon’s flair for dialogue and keen sense of comic timing. The best scenes depict the relationships among the heroes, with Whedon’s quips sprinkled amid vast, lively brawls. He also provides a satisfying variety of battle scopes: wild, whopping slugfests, like the one between the Hulk and Thor, are juxtaposed with intricately choreographed close-quarters fights, like that between Black Widow and Hawkeye. Whedon takes pleasure in the excess while keeping a rein on it. The recruitment of each Avenger, the clash of egos, the temporary scattering of the team — all of it beautifully builds to a climactic battle where the film lovingly engages with the grandiosity of its subjects.

Because even more so than those that preceded it, “The Avengers” feels like a film about the birth of legends. Several scenes provide absorbing panoramas of the heroes moving as if they’re of the same mind. A mesmerizing sequence follows one hero to another as they cross paths on the battlefield.

The movie’s relevance as a cultural artifact cannot be overstated. And I use the term “artifact” here not to mean some fossil removed from our time but rather a token — a treasure, in fact — revealing what fandom was, what it had been before and what it would grow to be in subsequent years.

“The Avengers,” with its indulgent action shots of the heroes teamed up, posed or fighting side by side, synthesizes the razzledazzle of Hollywood with the earnest heart of fandom, giving us something epic to see. —

“Here, watch this.”

I was handed an unmarked VHS cassette. “What is it?” I asked.

“Just watch it.”

It was June 1999 and I was working for a company that made promotional videos for summer camps. I was on location at a camp and, after a day of shooting, was hanging out with a few camp staffers at their cabin. One of them had received this videotape from a friend in Los Angeles. I started watching and wondered, “is this someone’s home movies?” As I continued, the shaky footage of young documentarians lost in the woods was becoming more and more creepily unsettling.

And as it reached its chilling conclusion, I was shook. I remember saying out loud, “Please let there be credits, please let there be credits,” ANY indication that what I had just seen wasn’t real. There were credits (thank God) and yes, I had just watched “The Blair Witch Project” without having any clue what it was, one night at a summer camp in the woods. I didn’t have any idea that it would go on to become a cultural phenomenon.

I retreated back to the cabin where I was staying and turned out the light. Then I turned it right back on. There was no way I was sleeping alone in the dark that night. —

Little was conventional about Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 film, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” which helped make it the high