(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Right up top, the narrator warns you this is not a love story, and a whole generation of guys still walked out blaming Summer. She told Tom she didn’t want anything serious. He heard a wedding toast. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays him like a mixtape that learned to sulk, and the script knows exactly how much of a mess he is. The honest problem is Summer herself. We only ever see her through his eyes, so Zooey Deschanel spends most of the runtime as a mood board instead of a person. The shuffled timeline is the best trick here, a happy day dropped right next to a miserable one like an old photo you forgot to delete. Chloë Grace Moretz as the little sister gives better advice than every adult in the movie. The expectations versus reality split screen still stings. A 7.9 because it’s a breakup movie that quietly roasts its own hero. $63 says you rewatch it someday and switch sides on who the bad guy was.

What works: The shuffled timeline, the expectations versus reality split screen, and a lead performance that makes Tom easy to root for and easy to roll your eyes at.

What doesn’t: Summer stays a mystery for so long that Zooey Deschanel barely gets to play a real person until the final scenes.

Who it’s for: Anyone who has ever reread an old text thread looking for the exact moment it went wrong.