Metacritic reviews

Summer ’84 requires patience. If you find yourself feeling like you’re bored by familiarity, just wait. You won’t be disappointed.

If you’re patient, though, and not put off by the familiarity of this material, Summer of ’84 gains in interest and urgency as it goes.

Where Stranger Things goes for subtle, Summer goes for on-the-nose. Where the Netflix show offers nuanced, empathetic characters, this film gives us cardboard cutouts with performances to match.

At its height, Summer of ’84 sings like a sandy page-turner you end up finishing in the fall, with the wind swirling and mischief night just around the corner.

There’s an earnestness amid the well-executed jump scares and gruesome pay-off, an honesty that can sometimes be in short supply in teen-centric horror.

Mystery-wise, the film teases viewers pretty effectively, with plenty of jolts that suggest the boys are on the right track balanced by other signs they're making something out of nothing.... But with a couple of small exceptions, attempts to flesh out the teen characters don't work very well.

Summer of ’84 is only cute and competent enough to be diverting; it’s neither funny nor scary enough to leave a lasting impression.

A modest little suspense puzzle that simulates rather than builds on vastly better “my neighbor may be a murderer” stories from “Rear Window” to “Stranger Things.”

The film’s dialogue and characterization are similarly undercooked: The script strains painfully hard for off-the-cuff vulgarity, but never quite achieves it, and while the pop culture references—always a punching bag for critics when dealing with nostalgia-themed entertainments—are applied sparingly, the tin-earned dialogue gives them an awkward, shoehorned-in quality.