“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.

Neil LaBute, who would probably like you to forget he directed the remake of The Wicker Man, selects Dr. Zhivago for what turns out to be a pretty good reason.

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Bud Cort was in Austin recently to present a mini-festival of his films at the world-renowned Alamo Drafthouse, including one of the oddest entries on the Robert Altman filmography, Brewster McCloud, and the one movie pretty much everyone knows him from, Harold and Maude. The usual procedure with this sort of personal appearance is to do a few interviews with the local press in advance, so they can get into print in time to publicize the event. For example, this piece in the Austin Chronicle, in which Cort attributes Harold’s status as the original goth to “the costume designer on the film, Bill Theiss, who met me in New York and took me shopping. We bought this great black trench coat and then lined it in red, and there's one little scene in the film where it kind of blows open in the wind and you see, just for a second, that little line of red. It's so subtle, but it's so cool.”

And then there’s the interview Cort did with the Austin American Statesman’s Chris Garcia on the morning of his Alamo appearance.

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