With all due respect to all four seasons, there is a reason summer lends itself to so many memorable movies, books and songs. The long days, blazing heat and languorous pace are steeped in nostalgia.
It is a time for vacations and road trips, first loves and teary goodbyes, sleepaway camps and childhood adventures. If there is a summer MVP in the movies, it might just be Richard Dreyfuss, who appears in three of my picks for the 10 best summer fllms. And speaking of, here they are.
10. National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983, dir. Harold Ramis)
“Family vacation”—just the phrase itself evokes memories. And who knows—a few of them might even be pleasant. National Lampoon’s Vacation commemorates how things can go very wrong on summer road trips, at least if you happen to be the Griswold family. Director Harold Ramis and screenwriter John Hughes indulge their inner 12-year-olds in this broad comedy of the Griswolds—Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo as Clark and Ellen Griswold, Anthony Michael Hall and Dana Barron as their teenage children—journeying across the country to visit the fictional Wally World amusement park. While the movie spawned five sequels, the original shows its age with at least one scene that turns on flagrantly racist stereotypes. But this is not a vacation you book for good taste. Best of all is Chase, whose prowess for physical comedy was never better.
9. Summer of ‘42 (1971, dir. Robert Mulligan)
Nostalgia at its most melancholy, Summer of ‘42 is based on the memories of screenwriter Herman Raucher and his affair with a young married woman when he was 15. During an eventful summer on Nantucket island, teenage Hermie (Gary Grimes) and two buddies (Jerry Houser and Oliver Conant) obsess over sex. Hermie is smitten with an attractive young bride (Jennifer O’Neill) alone at a nearby cottage while her man is off at war. While the film inspired a sequel two years later, the idea of a 15-year-old boy having sex with an adult woman has not aged especially well. Still, Summer of ‘42 registers as achingly poignant, thanks to the atmospherics of Robert Surtees’ cinematography and Michel Legrand’s elegant, Oscar-winning score.
8. Summertime (1955, dir. David Lean)
We don’t all have the luxury of spending a summer in Venice, but at least cinephiles have this romance from David Lean. Adapted from Arthur Laurents’ play The Time of the Cuckoo, Summertime stars Katharine Hepburn as Jane Hudson, a “fancy secretary” from Ohio who has “saved up such a long time” for a bucket-list vacation in the City of Canals. Her complicated fling with a married (but separated) Italian antiques dealer (Rossano Brazzi) carries a whiff of dated spinster pity, but Hepburn delivers a prim, affecting performance that earned an Oscar nomination. “The love affair itself may be formulaic, but Hepburn falling in love is a miracle,” wrote film critic David Denby in an essay for the Criterion Collection. “Her opening up to passion… is the main reason she remained a star despite all her upper-class mannerisms and by-golly declarativeness.” And it is impossible to resist the visual splendor of Venice, commemorated in lush Technicolor by cinematographer Jack Hildyard.
7. Adventureland (2009, dir. Greg Mottola)
Like several of the best summertime movies on this list, Adventureland serves up the distinct flavor of youth in a particular time and place, in this case the late 1980s—or perhaps how Gen X prefers to remember it. Following his success with Superbad, director Greg Mottola befuddled moviegoers, not to mention Miramax’s marketing arm, by not jumping to Superbad 2. Jesse Eisenberg is James Brennan, a recent Oberlin graduate who takes a summer job at a rundown Pittsburgh amusement park hoping to save enough money for help with graduate school. Kristen Stewart is the co-worker he pines for and Ryan Reynolds the married handyman with whom she’s having an affair. Melodrama unfolds without feeling forced. Mottola leans into period needle-drops and a distinctive score by indie rock veterans Yo La Tengo to create a relaxed, slacker vibe. Even better are Eisenberg and Stewart. Their engaging rapport makes Adventureland a summer romance that feels effortless.
6. Dazed and Confused (1993, dir. Richard Linklater)
Richard Linklater’s scruffy comedy about Texas teens at the start of summer vacation 1976 does for Generation X what American Graffiti (see #3) did for boomers. Like that earlier picture, Dazed and Confused features young actors then on the cusp of stardom, including Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, Milla Jovovich and a scene-stealing Matthew McConaughey (a University of Texas student at the time) whose performance is “all right, all right, all right!” The keg parties and potheads, the jocks and the hazing, and a classic-rock soundtrack—the film’s recreation of the 1970s is, as essayist Chuck Klosterman observed, less about how things were and more about how things are remembered. And that is ultimately what summer is about—a period we romanticize and mythologize even while we are living it. In the film’s final image, four kids drive to Houston to get Aerosmith concert tickets while Foghat’s “Slow Ride” booms over the soundtrack. The scene is freedom, aimlessness and weed: the trinity of summer.
5. Call Me by Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino)
In the hands of director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory, this coming-of-age story is suffused with bliss. Based on a 2007 book by André Aciman, the film introduces us to 17-year-old Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) and his growing infatuation with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a handsome and charismatic 24-year-old college student who has come to live with Elio’s family in Northern Italy during the summer of 1983. Call Me by Your Name is filtered through the haze of romantic memory. Ravishing imagery and sound design, not to mention the elegiac music of Sufjan Stevens, capture the pleasant wooziness of long summer days. The mood is lazy and languorous, quietly seductive but thrumming with the allure of sex and the low drone of cicadas. First loves are among the most memorable, especially when they unfold in a sun-dappled Italian summer paradise.
4. Stand by Me (1986, dir. Rob Reiner)
I won’t spoil anything by referencing the final scene of Stand by Me, but it’s worth quoting a sentence from it: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Rob Reiner’s adaptation of a Stephen King novella homes in on that declaration. Set in a small Oregon town in 1959, the movie follows a somber summer adventure—to locate the body of a missing child—undertaken by four friends: Gordie (Wil Wheaton), Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell). It is a testament to Reiner’s sure-handed direction and the four child performances that the characters rise above archetypes and carry emotional heft. The film touches on the boys’ difficult home lives, but balances these moments with the glory of being at an age when it’s perfectly logical to debate who would win in a fight between Mighty Mouse and Superman. As the story is framed as the recollections of Gordie as an adult, played by Richard Dreyfuss, Stand by Me revels in the mythology of summer. It is unabashedly honey-dipped nostalgia, but its sentimentality is entirely earned.
3. American Graffiti (1973, dir. George Lucas)
In George Lucas’ second feature after his futuristic, commercially disappointing THX 1138, the filmmaker returned to the past of his youth in Modesto, California, circa 1962. American Graffiti follows a handful of teenagers on the last night of summer vacation. High school sweethearts Steve (Ron Howard) and Laurie (Cindy Williams) consider how their relationship will change with Steve away at college. Laurie’s brother Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is eager to track down a pretty girl in a white Thunderbird who smiled at him. Toad (Charles Martin Smith) gets to use Steve’s “superfine machine” of a car, while local James Dean-wannabe John (Paul Le Mat) faces a drag-race challenger (Harrison Ford, in an early role). Hardly monumental stakes, but they matter in the lives of these likable young people. “I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in,” Lucas told author Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. “I wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought being a teenager was really about—from about 1945 to 1962.” Like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (see #6), its spiritual child, the film captures a specific moment in American teenage life, albeit through the prism of remembrance.
2. Do the Right Thing (1989, dir. Spike Lee)
Among film’s greatest works about race relations in the United States, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is also one helluva summer picture. Set during the hottest day of the year in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section, the picture transforms the heat itself into a character. “Today’s temperature’s gonna rise up over 100 degrees,” announced the local radio DJ, Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), “so there’s a Jheri curl alert! If you have a Jheri curl, stay in the house or you’ll end up with a permanent black helmet on your head forever!” Ernest Dickerson’s cinematography, distinguished by bold color and tight close-ups, can make viewers sweat. The rising temperature fans racial tensions in a neighborhood ready to figuratively erupt. No wonder the original title was Heatwave. Along with Dickerson’s marvelous work, a lush score by Bill Lee (the filmmaker’s father) and stunning ensemble cast—including John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Aiello and Bill Nunn—make Do the Right Thing one of cinema’s most evocative depictions of summer.
(See more in The 10 best films about Black and white America.)
1. Jaws (1975, dir. Steven Spielberg)
It opened in theaters on June 20, 1975, a date that would forever change the movie business by kickstarting the age of the summer blockbuster and helping establish the strategy of nationwide wide releases. Jaws was a runaway smash, but I’m betting you knew that already. The film recouped its budget within a few weeks and went on to become the biggest box-office success up to that time. Universal Pictures, the studio that had given the world Dracula and Frankenstein, now had the biggest monster hit of all, only this time the monster was a great white shark. For Jaws’ young director, Steven Spielberg, the terror came during the making of the film itself. The five-and-a-half-month shoot in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts dragged on and on, chiefly because the mechanical sharks—which Spielberg collectively named “Bruce” in honor of his lawyer—broke down repeatedly. Insiders began dubbing the movie “Flaws.” But necessity proved the mother of invention, and so the 27-year-old director had to be strategic about using the shark. That restraint ratchets up the film’s white-knuckled tension, with a valuable assist by John Williams’ iconic theme music. You know the plot. Fictional Amity Island is accustomed to making an economic killing each summer with the arrival of beach-loving tourists, so its mayor (Murray Hamilton) is reluctant to close the beaches when there are signs of a massive shark in the area. The killing becomes literal during a hellish Fourth of July in a sequence that Spielberg makes a masterclass in suspense. Amity’s police chief (Roy Scheider) teams up with a smarty-pants oceanographer (Richard Dreyfuss) and a grizzled shark killer (Robert Shaw) to track down the man-eater. The principal actors are exceptional and have chemistry together (even if Dreyfuss and Shaw clashed offscreen). Shaw’s monologue, about the real-life sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II and the sharks that attacked the stranded sailors, is as chilling as anything in Jaws.
Honorable mention: Dirty Dancing (1987, dir. Emile Ardolino), The Green Ray (1986, dir. Éric Rohmer), Mamma Mia! (2008, dir. Phyllida Lloyd), Meatballs (1979, dir. Ivan Reitman), Moonrise Kingdom (2012, dir. Wes Anderson), Picnic (1955, dir. Joshua Logan), Summer with Monika (1953, dir. Ingmar Bergman), The Swimmer (1968, dir. Frank Perry), Wet Hot American Summer (2001, dir. David Wain), Y Tu Mamá También (2001, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 