The Best Movie Ever | Ron Howard

Few actors have made a more successful transition to directing than Ron Howard, who – after years of co-starring in popular television series like The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days – became a blockbuster filmmaker in his own right. If anything, contemporary audiences are so familiar with films like Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code and The Grinch that they may have completely forgotten he used to be an actor… if they ever knew in the first place.

He’s directed some of the most popular films ever made and won an Oscar for his trouble, and this weekend he unleashes his latest drama In the Heart of the Sea on audiences everywhere. But what’s the best Ron Howard movie ever? We asked our expert panel of film critics – Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, and Collider’s Brian Formo – and as usual, they couldn’t agree a single thing. 

Related: ‘In the Heart of the Sea’ Review | Too Big to Whale

Find out what they picked and let us know your favorites, and come back next Wednesday for another all-new, highly debatable installment of The Best Movie Ever!

Brian Formo’s Pick: Splash (1984)

Touchstone Films

Ron Howard capably directs middle of the road, crowd-pleasing fare. That’s fine. Apollo 13, Ransom, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, they’re all fine—well, maybe not A Beautiful Mind, which he won two Oscars from for scrubbing the life and marriage of mathematician John Nash to a slate clean of homosexuality, antisemitism, adultery, and even the ethnicity of his wife—but they’re also really basic and unadventurous.

Since I can’t pick his charming narration of one of the great television shows of all time, Arrested Development, as his best movie, I’ll choose the one that takes something basic—boy meets girl—and gives it just enough of a push in a new direction to be his best movie ever. So hold on to your butts, ladies and gents—for my least passionate entry (ever!) in Best Movie Ever—I’m choosing Splash. 

Released the same year as John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet, Splash adds to the fish out of the (80s) water narrative by dropping a sexy mermaid (Daryl Hannah) into the bed of a grown man (Tom Hanks) who’s made a wish “to meet a woman, fall in love, get married, have a kid and see him play a tooth in the school play.” The mermaid, who loses her fins whenever she’s out of the water, is essentially an alien who has pieced herself together via consumerism. She names herself Madison because she walked up Madison Avenue, the first word she learned was Bloomingdale’s, and she soaks up a lot of information from Crazy Eddie commercials on television. To win her heart they both have to untangle it from the overabundant stimuli of femme advertising.

Hannah is sweet, Hanks is early Hanks, and the script has a welcome critique of brand identity. But let’s not kid ourselves—the fondness we have for Splash is for John Candy. Particularly his crowd-diffusing line, “You never saw a guy sleep with a fish before? Get back to work!”

William Bibbiani’s Pick: Willow (1988)

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Ron Howard is a hard filmmaker to pin down. He’s obviously skilled but with the exception of a strong emphasis on family values, there seem to be very few recurring themes throughout his work. He is, I have come to realize, a very dedicated genre filmmaker, trying his hand at practically every type of story over the course of his career. Rom-coms (Splash), sci-fi (Cocoon), sports (Rush), westerns (The Missing), family (The Grinch), disaster (Apollo 13), conspiracy (The Da Vinci Code)… you name it and Ron Howard has done it, and usually halfway well.

And yet so few of his films have a distinctive personality, unique to Ron Howard. That’s why I choose to embrace a film that isn’t the exception to his often derivative nature, but one that embraces it. The fantasy adventure Willow is the story of a peaceful little person, tasked with protecting a powerful thingy, teaming up with an unlikely group of heroes to stop a warlord. It is in no small way a direct rip-off of The Lord of the Rings, and it doesn’t hide its intentions in the slightest.

But there’s something almost freeing about Ron Howard’s work here. There’s no pretension, and no excuse not to have fun. Howard visualizes the hell out of Willow, with amazing transformations, unusual dragons, and frightening suits of armor. He finds the snark in every step of the journey, and allows Warwick Davis the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with Val Kilmer, at the height of his charismatic cattiness. They play off each other skillfully, charmingly. Willow may not be an original film – few of Howard’s films could be accused of that – but it’s probably his most entertaining, and this time I think that matters most.

Witney Seibold’s Pick: Apollo 13 (1995)

Universal Pictures

Ron Howard has had one of the most interesting careers of any high-profile “mainstream” director. He started as a child actor, starring in one notable TV series, as well as the wonderfully bonkers cult flick Village of the Giants. He would go on to move his way through the Roger Corman sausage factory, and would eventually burst into ultra-slick Hollywood productions to became the man behind bright and accessible Oscar bait. Since then, he has tilted into the realm of smokier, grittier dramas that, while feeling more down-to-Earth, still have the Hollywood imprimatur. He also made The Dilemma, which doesn’t really fit in any of those categories. 

Another notable thing: Almost all of Howard’s films are pretty good (Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas being the most obvious, festering exception). He definitely has an ease behind the camera, and a subtle mastery of a certain type of lightly meaningful entertainment. He can be compared to Robert Zemeckis in this regard. They both have a definite, bright aesthetic that goes down smooth like a quality beer, no matter what the genre they’re working in. And Howard has made biopics, fantasy films, comedies, and workplace dramas. And he’s moved through each challenge with aplomb. 

Ron Howard has even made some legitimately capital-G great films in his time, the best of which is probably 1995’s nail-biter Apollo 13. Howard manages to take a well-known true-life event – the disaster of the 1970 NASA moon mission, which stalled on the way and nearly killed three astronauts – and turn it into a legitimate edge-of-your-seat thriller which, oddly, still has you guessing the outcome. It’s an awesome production full of state-of-the-art special effects, and the best kind of disaster film: That with humanity. 

Previously on The Best Movie Ever:

Top Photo: Touchstone/Universal/MGM