1. The Talented Mr Ripley
Anthony Minghella (1999)
There’s a certain kind of sunshine that kisses everything with gold. And Anthony Minghella’s slick adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith thriller captures it perfectly – that gilded easy privilege of the in-crowd, slumming it during a long, languid summer on the Italian coast. Beguiled by nights hopping with jazz – electric, alive – conman Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) finds himself exquisitely tortured by the fickle enthusiasms and casual cruelty of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law). Perhaps not even Tom can unpick the mess of emotions he feels for Dickie – does he want to have him? Or to be him? He opts for the latter. Wendy Ide
2. Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee (1989)
“Whoo-ee, it’s gonna be a scorcher today!” During the hottest day of the summer, tensions come to the boil in a pressure-cooker Brooklyn neighbourhood. When first released, Spike Lee’s electrifying drama alarmed some conservative critics, who shrieked that the film was an incitement to riot – a claim previously made of such accepted classics as The Blackboard Jungle (1955). Brilliantly capturing the scorching atmosphere of a Bedford-Stuyvesant district heatwave, Do the Right Thing is as thrillingly edgy today as it was nearly 30 years ago. It earned Lee his first Oscar nomination, for best original screenplay. Mark Kermode
3. Tomboy
Céline Sciamma (2011)
New to a leafy suburb of Paris, 10-year-old Laure (Zoé Héran) immediately falls in with the local kids who spend the endless summer holidays hanging out in the woods. But she introduces herself as Mikael, not Laure. With her cropped hair and loose-limbed skater slouch, she is accepted by everyone as a boy, even starting a tentative flirtation with an older girl. With this sensitive, understated study of a transgender child, Céline Sciamma beautifully captures the suspended reality of summer. No school, no routine, new friends. For a few short months, Laure/Mikael is perfectly free. WI
4. Summer With Monika
Ingmar Bergman (1953)
People only casually acquainted with the work of Ingmar Bergman wouldn’t think of him as an especially summery film-maker: chilly despair may seem the characteristic temperature of his oeuvre, until you get to the spry, glinting warmth of Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), the serenity of Summer Interlude (1951), and, best of all, this airy, tender and finally bittersweet seasonal romance between two beautiful working-class kids, which still tingles with the kind of open sensuality that shocked non-Swedish audiences back in 1953. To watch it is akin to feeling a late-summer breeze on the back of your neck. Guy Lodge
5. Unrelated
Joanna Hogg (2007)
The ultimate Brits-abroad nightmare-holiday film, in which a middle-aged woman (Kathryn Worth) joins her posh friends at their Tuscany retreat. Arriving alone, she not only feels increasingly like a spare part, but risks her dignity as she tries to attract a young alpha male – a first big-screen sighting of Tom Hiddleston. If this subtly painful comedy of manners isn’t teeth-grinding enough for you, try the male counterpart – Suntan (Argyris Papadimitropoulos, 2016) in which a doctor on a Greek island falls horribly in love with a carefree Lolita among the Euro-vacationers. Both films should come prefaced by warnings for viewers of either sex aged above, say, 35. Jonathan Romney
6. Adventureland
Greg Mottola (2009)
This 1980s-set teen movie takes place in a crappy theme park that touts “Giant Ass Pandas” as unwinnable prizes and blares Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus on loop from its tinny speakers. Jesse Eisenberg’s James is stuck there for the summer earning money for college while his friends travel Europe; he meets the quiet, infinitely cooler Em (Kristen Stewart); the two fall in love as fireworks explode across the sky to the sound of Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over. A hangout comedy that speaks to the teenagerish sense of longing experienced during a dull summer spent at home – it’s perfect. Simran Hans
7. Morvern Callar
Lynne Ramsay (2002)
Full of sweat and sangria and stolen clinches with strangers, Morvern Callar’s hedonistic Ibiza trip is the kind of summer break that changes the way you relate to the world for ever. For Morvern (a mesmerising Samantha Morton), numbed by the suicide of her boyfriend and a lifetime spent in a dour Scottish dead-end town, it’s a holiday that opens her eyes. On a whim, she and her friend Lanna hire a car to take them high into the hills. They find their way blocked by a local festival. Morvern simply hauls her suitcase from the car and joins in. At that moment, she rejects the expectations that anchor to her home town and decides to follow her impulses instead. WI
8. The Swimmer
Frank Perry (1968)
Forget the beach for a minute. For some of us, it’s the sharp, sour aroma of swimming-pool chlorine that most vividly evokes summer, and no film – not even its more famous near-contemporary The Graduate (1967) – carries it quite as pungently as Frank Perry’s woozy, wistful adaptation of a John Cheever story. Showing up at a friend’s pool party one perfect weekend, a strapping Burt Lancaster resolves to “swim his way home” through the backyards and blue waters of suburban Connecticut, his unhappy past soaking through with every stop. The sunkissed perfection and freezing void of the American Dream have rarely been explored in such simultaneous detail. GL
9. Blissfully Yours
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2002)
Not strictly a summer film, but a hymn to the joys of sweat, sex and reverie in a lush forest setting. Thai auteur Apichatpong makes films (2010’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Cemetery of Splendor from 2015) that send the viewer into a distracted state of parallel consciousness – nowhere more so than in this oblique, dreamy anecdote. That’s partly thanks to a sound design rich with birdsong, insect chirps and the rustle of foliage. Two women and a man get away from their daily problems for a jungle break and some graphically depicted intimacy. Steamy in every sense, but also intensely strange and beautiful. JR
10. The Green Ray
Éric Rohmer (1986)
Let’s face it. Summer can be shit. Like New Year’s Eve, the annual holiday comes with such an expectation of enjoyment that a bad day feels like a personal failure. For Delphine (a largely improvised performance by Marie Rivière), evicted from her friend’s holiday plans and miserably adrift on the periphery of other people’s trips, the summer vacation is a source of acute anxiety. Shot on super 16mm, the film looks as grainy as a beach picnic on a windy day. It has an unflinching naturalism and authenticity which makes this ambling, unfocused quest for an elusive good time into painfully compulsive viewing. WI
11. Body Heat
Lawrence Kasdan (1981)
Literally and figuratively one of the hottest movies I’ve seen, Body Heat is an updated riff on Billy Wilder’s classic noir Double Indemnity (1944). A southern gothic erotic thriller with a B-movie style saxophone on the soundtrack, it stars Kathleen Turner (before she became the voice of Jessica Rabbit) and a mustachioed William Hurt as a pair of lovers whipped into a sweaty, passionate frenzy by the dizzying Florida heat. The chemistry between the pair is electric, but this is Turner’s film; a cool, conniving seductress, iconic in the white blouse and red pencil skirt that makes Hurt’s Ned reach boiling point. SH
12. Jaws
Steven Spielberg (1975)
Steven Spielberg’s visceral adaptation of Peter Benchley’s voracious best-seller scared a generation out of the water and into the cinemas. The story – a cross between Melville’s Moby-Dick and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People – finds a seaside resort terrorised by a great white shark as the 4 July holiday draws near. Roy Scheider is perfectly cast as the police chief who fails to close the beaches, with terrible results. With its sunny vistas and bloody waters, Jaws ate modern cinema whole; four decades later, it’s impossible to go for a summer swim without hearing John Williams’s threatening theme. MK
13. Y Tu Mamá También
Alfonso Cuarón (2001)
A vibrant performance by Maribel Verdú drives this rip-roaring road movie. Abandoned by their girlfriends for the summer, two hot-headed youths (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna) team up with Verdú’s more worldly Luisa on an often chaotic journey of discovery. The great humanist critic Roger Ebert famously cited Y Tu Mamá También as highlighting everything that was wrong with the US ratings system, describing the film as “realistic about sex, which is to say, franker and healthier than the smutty evasions forced on American movies by the R rating”. MK
14. Summertime
David Lean (1955)
Crammed with waddling tourists and hideous knockoff carnival masks, the canals of Venice in midsummer are about as viable a place to find love these days as the gardening-tools aisle of B&Q. Sixty-odd years ago, however, David Lean painted a far more swoonsome picture, with this iridescent Technicolor tale of an impermanent holiday romance – every bit as lovely and as heart-stirring as his more routinely celebrated Brief Encounter (1945). Katharine Hepburn, in one of her best screen roles, is the buttoned-up Ohio singleton who temporarily gets to live her best life under the Venetian sun, in the arms of dreamy antique dealer Rossano Brazzi. The scent of gardenias practically wafts off the screen. GL
15. Lilo & Stitch
Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois (2002)
Perhaps not the best-loved item in the latter-day Disney canon, but this eccentric science-fiction adventure – one of the studio’s later hand-drawn animations – has anarchic energy to burn. Stitch is a genetically engineered life form from space, something between a koala and a Boston terrier in a vivid shade of blue. Lilo is the equally unruly Hawaiian girl who adopts him as her “dog” and teams up with him to evade extraterrestrials and social workers alike. Elvis numbers and surfing pratfalls abound. Not without tinges of cuteness, but Stitch’s manic mischief will strike a chord with the Tasmanian Devil in every child. JR
16. The Parent Trap
Nancy Meyers (1998)
Nancy Meyers is America’s greatest working classicist. Best known for her romantic comedies (and her detailed attention to middle-class interior design), her family-friendly remake of The Parent Trap (1961) doesn’t abandon that format entirely. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as a pair of twins separated at birth who meet on holiday at Camp Walden aged 11, and swap lives in a bid to reunite their divorced parents (the late Natasha Richardson, and my favourite vineyard-owning hot dad, Dennis Quaid). Lohan is a joy as both prankster Cali Girl Hallie and the hilariously plummy, tweed skirt-suited Brit Annie. SH
17. Stranger By the Lake
Alain Guiraudie (2013)
“Hitchcockian” was the word routinely and not inappropriately hauled out by critics to describe Alain Guiraudie’s slinky, sinuous and increasingly dangerous erotic thriller, though much of the onscreen action here would have turned the Master of Suspense pale. Set on an idyllic lakeside cruising ground in rural France, the film’s serial-murder mystery bleeds through its otherwise joyously candid exploration of in-it-for-the-minute gay sexuality, which should get any viewer about as hot as the randy bathers on screen doing the circuit. Awash with vigorous unsimulated sex, it’s a welcome reminder that some of the best summer lovin’ really is of the fast variety. GL
18. The Go-Between
Joseph Losey (1971)
Oddly, it was two expatriate American directors who perfected the look of that quintessentially English form, the “white linen” period drama. James Ivory made the sub-genre a box-office staple, but it was Joseph Losey who got there first in this adaptation of LP Hartley’s drama of innocence lost, scripted by Harold Pinter. Dominic Guard plays the Edwardian schoolboy visiting Norfolk who gets caught in the crossfire of an illicit romance between his friend’s older sister (Julie Christie) and a farmer (Alan Bates). Shot by Gerry Fisher, the English rural summer has never seemed so languid or so treacherous. JR
19. The Kings of Summer
Jordan Vogt-Roberts (2013)
Before helming this year’s multimillion-dollar franchise behemoth Kong: Skull Island, Jordan Vogt-Roberts made his directorial feature debut with a winningly offbeat coming-of-age tale. Suffocated by their various suburban home lives, three teenagers run away to build their own house in the woods, with “no parents, no one telling us what to do!” Veering between Malick-inflected rural romanticism and down-to-earth DIY charm, this Sundance festival favourite came and went without fanfare in UK cinemas, but has since rightly achieved cult status. Combining bittersweet comedy and beautifully observed satire, it’s a gently subversive summer gem. MK
20. Pauline at the Beach
Éric Rohmer (1983)
In Eric Rohmer’s wordy romantic comedy, everyone is hot, bothered and bored. The third film in the French director’s “comedies and proverbs” series (and the second from the series to feature in this list), it takes place in a Normandy beach town and centres on 15-year-old Pauline (Amanda Langlet), a gangly, mousy teen who serves as the sensible foil to her flighty blond bombshell older cousin Marion (Arielle Dombasle). “A wagging tongue bites itself”, reads the opening title card, a wink to the film’s twisting, intellectual, and ultimately self-defeating discussions about love. It’s also a delicious time capsule of a 1980s summer holiday, from Marion’s teased bouffant to the Club Med-style outfits that are worn to a makeshift disco at the local community centre. SH
21. Stand By Me
Rob Reiner (1986)
“In all our lives, there’s a fall from innocence…” Adapted from Stephen King’s story The Body (published in the same 1982 Different Seasons novella collection as Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which itself became a hit film), Rob Reiner’s masterpiece finds young friends facing up to matters of life and death over the 1959 Labor Day weekend – marking the end of the summer and the significant start of the autumn. Pitched somewhere between carefree youthful adventure and existential adult drama, Stand By Me is a melancholy marvel which reminds us that there’s so much more to King than horror. MK
22. Gimme the Loot
Adam Leon (2012)
There are so many great films set in New York during the summer, but Leon’s debut feature Gimme the Loot might be my favourite. Sofia (Tashiana Washington) and Malcolm (Ty Hickson) are two teenage graffiti artists from the Bronx; they walk and talk and quip at each other as they roam the streets, Leon’s unobtrusive camera loping behind. You can almost feel the thick, sour-sweet fog of inner-city heat pressing down on them as they try to figure out a way to get hold of the $500 they need to bribe a security guard at Citi Field baseball stadium. SH
23. Céline and Julie Go Boating
Jacques Rivette (1974)
In the balmy, near-deserted streets of Paris in summer, two young women – a librarian and a stage magician – become friends, or possibly lovers, and embark on a bizarre, freewheeling adventure that involves occult sweets, a mysterious old house and a little girl held captive by ghosts. French New Wave veteran Jacques Rivette devised the film together with his cast, headed by Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier. The result is a joyously rule-breaking experimental feminist fantasy that tips its hat to the surrealist tradition, and the magic of silent-era serials. Be warned, there’s a certain amount of hippie-era goofiness, not least in the wardrobes. JR
24. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday
Jacques Tati (1953)
A peerless purveyor of slapstick, moustache-based sight gags and anarchy-infused tennis games, Jacques Tati hit new levels of popularity with this film, the first to feature his blundering alter-ego Mr Hulot. This picture sees the inimitable Mr Hulot unwittingly create havoc in a stuffy holiday resort town. It’s an amiable delight, driven by deliciously absurd pratfalls and practically no dialogue. A mishap with a folding boat is a particular high point – a moment of elegantly executed silliness which nods back to the work of the clowns of silent cinema. Hulot himself is key influence on Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean, but don’t let that put you off. WI
25. Magic Mike XXL
Gregory Jacobs (2015)
In the steamy-sticky world of Channing Tatum’s eponymous Florida stripper, “sun’s out, guns out” may as well be a year-round mantra. But down to its Fourth of July finale, this gyrating good time is heated through with the kind of humid, delirious desire that takes hold in the hottest months, filtered through a refreshingly feminine gaze: a key dance sequence in a crowded, sweat-slicked pleasuredome for black female patrons is literally, and quite thrillingly, overheated. GL
