A summer job can feel like an alternate universe, filled with people you know deeply, but barely tasks that make and break the business, but have no bearing on the future; moments that seem to change the very course of life, but were really just parties where you got too drunk. Adventureland captures the strangeness of flash-in-a-pan, interim work, following Jesse Eisenberg's James as floats through his job at a local amusement park while waiting for his life to start. Sweet, bleak, and nostalgic, it's a dramedy that should ring familiar even if you never ran a hoodwinking, carney game booth.

The legendary John Huston directs Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in this shaggy adventure about British missionaries warding off German World War I gunboats in East Africa.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's quirky French flick can be easy to make fun of, perhaps because it's what everyone immediately thinks of when they hear the words "foreign film." But don't let haters dissuade you from this critically acclaimed rom-com, which was rightfully a major box-office success and awards contender. The story follows its titular heroine (Audrey Tautou) through Paris as she sheds her sense of isolation, opens herself up to others, and discovers love. (Also, yeah, garden gnome alert.)

Adapted by renowned playwright Tom Stoppard, this take on Leo Tolstoy's classic Russian novel is anything but stuffy, historical drama. Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander are all overflowing with passion and desire, heating up the chilly backdrop of St. Petersburg. But it's director Joe Wright's unique staging -- full of dance, lush costuming, fourth-wall-breaking antics, and other theatrical touches -- that reinvent the story for more daring audiences.

For those of us who weren't born early enough for the Space Race, there's Armageddon. While it might seem like an outlier in the Criterion Collection, Michael Bay's sci-fi spectacle is lean, expertly crafted, and rowdy, with scenes of meteoric destruction that channel Michelangelo. The final ludicrous mission to blow up the plummeting space rock is the closest we'll come to a Bay-directed opera. But it's the cast -- Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson, Steve Buscemi, and so many more -- that makes Armageddon a ride. Bay's drill-team heroes add red and white to their blue collars for a fist-pumping display of patriotism, no international enemy required.

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