The Shallows

Think critics hate horror? Think again.

From surfing, boating, and diving trips gone wrong to sci-fi disaster flicks with bite, these are great shark movies.

Every single week, new movies open in theaters. Even if you go to the multiplex regularly, there’s just not enough time to see it all (at least without losing your job and family). So when you’re looking to catch up with some of the year’s best, where should you start?

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.

Against a dark and cloudy sky, a girl races towards the ocean. A drunk young man follows close behind. “Where are we going?” he groans. “Swimming!” she replies. The drunk boy stumbles and falls; only the girl makes it to the water, which shimmers in the moonlight like a sea of liquid jewels. She dives in. All is calm and perfect. The girl will never return to dry land.

Final trailers are typically the most revelatory and tend to show a little too much, whether it’s the action or the humor or the goriest shots and jump scares. But Sony’s final trailer for The Shallows takes a very different and more effective approach, teasing out just enough from the Blake Lively vs. a Shark thriller to keep us seriously invested in whatever the hell happens to her next. Clearly, she’s going to outwit this shark. This trailer makes us want to see how she does it.

Man, sharks suck. Blake Lively’s Nancy is just trying to catch a few waves off a secluded beach her mom told her about. But a big fish bites a chunk out of her leg, complicating the whole ‘Blue Crush’ vibe.

Surprise! Jaume Collet-Serra has a new movie that doesn’t star Liam Neeson! Unless maybe he plays the shark? The first trailer for The Shallows teases a much smaller thriller from the director of Neeson flicks Non-Stop and Run All Night, and although this is a much more simple film, Collet-Serra’s latest already looks more thrilling and intense than his recent efforts.