“Summer movie” is one of those phrases like “beach novel” or “toilet wine” that causes an immediate, involuntary adjustment of our expectations. (I was going to say “lowering of expectations,” but we make some mighty tasty toilet wine here at Screengrab headquarters.) When we hear “summer movie,” we think of explosions or aliens or exploding aliens, even though by Hollywood’s calendar, there is no time of year that isn’t appropriate for movies about exploding aliens. But by that same token, there are summer movies that feature hardly any exploding aliens at all. To kick off the season, the New York Times asked several motion picture luminaries to ruminate on their favorite summer movies, with surprising results.

Paradise director Michael Almereyda’s selection isn’t that far off the beaten path, aside from the fact that it was actually released in March.

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Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege."

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