Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Too much time and effort in Cinemaland is wasted turning film into a game of winners and losers; Movie X made Y dollars so it matters more than Movie Z. But a film is way more than its box-office total. Some of the best movies released in 2016 failed to meet their financial expectations.

It’s a big year for the Oscars, and not just because of the movies. 2016 brought us a record-breaking 27 animated films eligible for Best Animated Feature, and today the Academy announced that there is a whopping 91 tracks eligible for Best Original Song.

Okay, so it was one of the worst summer movie seasons in recent memory. Trying to find the good blockbusters amongst the last four months releases sometimes felt like trying to find a needle in a stack of s---. But even this year there were diamonds in the rough. Today we’re celebrating the ten best, the summer movies of 2016 that didn’t make us weep for the future of cinema — and note that this list is just movies that got wide releases in at least 500 theaters. We’ll have a separate piece on under-the-radar summer films you might have missed next week on ScreenCrush. In the meantime, let’s celebrate the highlights from a depressing summer before we clear the decks and get ready for the fall.

ScreenCrush Editor-in-Chief Matt Singer handpicks three new titles you can watch at home this August from Movies on Demand.

The Lonely Island, the comedy musical trio behind great American classics ‘Dick in a Box,’ ‘I’m on a Boat, ‘and ‘Jizz in My Pants,’ are now movie stars. Or at least they star in a new movie as fake pop stars mocking celebrity culture and the music industry.

It’s been more than 30 years since This Is Spinal Tap hilariously mocked the pop music scene and launched the mockumentary subgenre. If there can be such a thing as a “spiritual remake” of an old movie, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is it. It takes the same basic structure as Spinal Tap (a fake documentary about life in the music industry) and its narrative framework (a formerly hot pop acts fall from grace) and layers in a whole new generation of jokes about dopey celebrities in the age of social media. It doesn’t break any new ground, and it might not even be its creators’ most effective satire of this subject, but it is funny.

If you’re a fan of The Lonely Island, then you’re probably pretty stoked for Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which features a whole soundtrack full of new songs from the musical comedy trio. Leading up to the film’s release next week, we’ve already seen a few music videos featuring Andy Samberg’s fictional alter ego Conner4Real — including an amazing Bin Laden-themed video that debuted on SNL. Universal has released yet another obviously NSFW music video from Popstar, this time with a little freestyle action.

The new Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping trailer made me laugh out loud four times. If we assume the movie is 90 minutes long, and that runtime-to-laugh ratio holds, then this should be the funniest movie ever made.

One of the most exciting things about a new movie from The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schafer) is that we also get a new Lonely Island album. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping opens in theaters on June 3, but you don’t have to wait until next month to get a listen to some of the new songs from the mockumentary...

The Lonely Island’s upcoming music mockumentary Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping won’t start never stopping until June 3, but Universal has already released a green-band trailer for the eyeballs too innocent for last week’s red-band delight. The newly released spot covers most of the same territory as the previously released trailer, introducing the intricate network of assistants in the orbit of pop sensation Conner4Real (Andy Samberg) and the star-studded roster of performers who will portray them.