20. American Graffiti (1973)
Let’s begin at the end. 2 September 1962: the final night of the summer vacation; one last big blowout before adult life intervenes. George Lucas’s rambunctious salute to footloose youth paints vivid vignettes of Modesto, California, rocking around the clock with its loose-knit gaggle of characters. But this has one eye on the metre and knows that time is running short.
19. The Lost Daughter (2021)
“It’s a working holiday,” insists Olivia Colman’s brittle academic, blasting her factor-50 smile at the bemused guests and staff of a Greek island resort. She’s in flight from her past and liable to combust any second. Paradise here offers little rest or respite. The professor has made a clean getaway, but she’s brought along all her baggage.
18. My Summer of Love (2004)
In which Natalie Press’s working-class Yorkshire lass finds an exotic foreign land just a hop and a skip across the moor in the form of the ivy-clad house of Emily Blunt’s boarding-school princess. Director Paweł Pawlikowski slowly turns up the temperature as the girls lean into the season, lounging in the dry grass and listening to Edith Piaf. They’re at once stickily close and a thousand miles apart.
17. Summertime (1955)
David Lean’s tender Technicolor romance was one of the first British films to be shot entirely on location, strolling around beautiful, dirty Venice in the company of Katharine Hepburn’s middle-aged Miss Lonelyheart. Lean called for her to step backwards into the green canal at Campo San Barnaba. Hepburn gamely obliged and clambered out with conjunctivitis.
16. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
Sex and death ride shotgun in Alfonso Cuarón’s lustful field trip through turn-of-the-century Mexico. Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna are teenage buddies who light out for the beach with their engines overheating; Maribel Verdú co-stars as the exacting older woman who, if not quite steering them straight, at least helps point them in interesting new directions.
15. Summer Holiday (1963)
A summer holiday list without Summer Holiday? It would be like the Tower without the ravens or mistletoe without the wine. Directed with an easy swing by Peter Yates (his debut, and he would go on to make Bullitt and Breaking Away), this now stands as a colourful blast from the past, an innocent postcard from postwar, pre-Brexit Europe. A blue-collar bus mechanic – embodied by Cliff Richard – magics up a new route from Hertfordshire down to Athens, complete with entertainment and a flurry of comic misadventures. Only a churl wouldn’t get on board.
14. Tomboy (2011)
Céline Sciamma makes small rousing films about secret lives, sanctuaries and precious stolen moments. Tomboy is one of her best: a gorgeous coming-of-age tale about 10-year-old Laure (Zoé Héran), who – bouncing between schools, the new kid on the block – introduces herself as Mickaël and effectively becomes another person. Sciamma’s implied message? That the humble summer break can be a transformational timeout, with September’s child only distantly related to July’s.
13. La Piscine (1969)
The pool is a mirror in Jacques Deray’s dazzling, depthless thriller pungently set on the French Riviera and tapping the off-screen tensions of co-stars Romy Schneider and Alain Delon. If La Piscine’s air of modish ennui now feels overused, that’s because it’s a design classic, most notably lifted and adapted by both François Ozon’s Swimming Pool and Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash.
12. Roman Holiday (1953)
“Rome. By all means, Rome,” declares Audrey Hepburn’s runaway princess after spending a liberative, life-changing few days in the eternal city with Gregory Peck’s US newsman. As for the movie, this might be the ultimate European and American meet-cute. Shot on location, skipping between the tourist sights, Roman Holiday wedded old-school Hollywood romance with the looser rhythm of Italian neorealism.
11. A Summer’s Tale (1996)
Eric Rohmer was the poet laureate of French dreamers, the creator of films that feel flyweight and then linger for a lifetime. A Summer’s Tale is his semi-autobiographical account of a lost summer spent on the coast of Brittany pursuing sea shanties and women with the same awkward stumble. It’s a hazy, lazy joy of a film, brimming with sunlight and rocked by the backwash of chatter and song.
10. Dirty Dancing (1987)
Everything’s big in this Borscht Belt summer classic. Big gestures, big emotions, big drums on the soundtrack, big hair. It’s 1963 and Baby (Jennifer Grey) is getting whisked off her feet by Patrick Swayze’s bad-boy dance instructor. The Catskills are a cauldron of class and ethnic tensions; first love is an intoxicating, disorientating hot mess. Resistance is futile: the film lifts and spins us. Grand finale, big reward.
9. Sundown (2021)
The best holidays are the ones that you never, ever want to end. Michel Franco’s Sundown casts Tim Roth as mild-mannered Neil, whose Mexican vacation is interrupted by the news of his mother’s sudden death. The trouble is that Neil would really prefer not to leave. So he pretends he’s lost his passport, shoves his tear-stained family through the departure gate and then circles back to the beach with the satisfied air of a man who’s just put out all the bins. Who is this Neil? What the hell is he thinking? He’s the shadow beneath the parasol, the chip of ice in the cocktail glass and the finest existential antihero this side of L’Étranger.
8. The Go-Between (1971)
LP Hartley’s source novel was elegant and reflective, weighed down by the heat as it traces the illicit exchange of letters via a lovestruck schoolboy. Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter make the mood more jangly and atonal, perpetually on the verge of panic. What a wonderfully treacherous period drama this is, the filmic equivalent of a strip of flypaper. All the characters are stuck and squirming. None of them are getting away unscathed.
7. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953)
This was initially lower on the list, as befits its musty antique status, but then I watched it again and it’s flawless – there’s nothing else quite like it. Jacques Tati is the hapless holidaymaker who haunts the wings of a seaside town sometimes as a mute witness, sometimes as an agent of gentle chaos. If anything, Tati’s comedy grows more cherishable with each passing decade. Watching it is like peering into a forgotten tide-pool ecosystem: the rumble-tumble lost world of the postwar French resort.
6. Dazed and Confused (1993)
Where its spiritual ancestor, American Graffiti, began at the end, the uproarious Dazed and Confused wraps up at the start. It’s the first full day of the 1976 summer break. The high-school kids are wafting groggily back to earth, buffeted and elated after a wild night around town. They’ve drunk beer and shot pool, run amok and made out, and now there’s nothing on the horizon except an Aerosmith concert and the month of June. Sunrise on the football field; the golden morning of their lives.
5. Summer with Monika (1953)
Flee your family, feel the city; steer a boat around the archipelago. Ingmar Bergman’s jolting kitchen-sink romance casts Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg as working-class Stockholm kids who make a bold bid for freedom and yet are bound for the rocks. Bergman was always drawn to life’s extremes – its sunlight and shadow, its ecstasies and agonies – but rarely made them feel as purely relatable as here.
4. Days and Nights in the Forest (1970)
Forget the beach and the island retreat – it is the forest where summer breaks tend to deepen and darken. Four Kolkata bachelors drive into the backwoods of Bihar only to realise that there is more than one way to get lost. What follows is an antic meditation on all the big stuff: friendship, responsibility, class and cultural divisions. Writer-director Satyajit Ray takes a humdrum off-the-peg concept – the buddy hangout comedy – and makes it mythic, mysterious and borderline elemental.
3. The Green Ray (1986)
The second Rohmer film on the list is a small miracle about a small miracle. Specifically it’s about thirtysomething Delphine (Marie Rivière), who is newly single and drifting in a kind of semi-ostracised state across France. But it is also about the green ray, which can reputedly be glimpsed for a split second at sunset and might quietly, magically make everything right. Rohmer employed a skeleton crew and encouraged his cast to improvise, ensuring that his film remained unencumbered and almost weightless, open to the world’s possibilities and the happy accidents it might send our way.
2. Aftersun (2022)
Charlotte Wells’s rapturous family album is still relatively recent and may yet fade out as the years go by. Then again maybe not, because if Aftersun tells us anything it’s that memory only intensifies an experience and that lost summers burn brighter the older we get. On screen it’s for ever 1999 and Paul Mescal’s young father is in Turkey with his daughter (Frankie Corio), browsing for rugs and lounging by the pool, searching for sunshine and averting their gaze from the shadows. Wells’s astonishing debut feature doesn’t feel directed so much as recovered and resurrected. It’s an impressionistic, deeply felt and finally devastating tour de force.
1. Before Sunrise (1995)
The summer holiday can be a time of freedom and escape, romance and self-discovery. It is all of these things in Richard Linklater’s mid-90s masterpiece about a pair of garrulous Interrailers (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) who steal a few precious hours and wander around Vienna for the night. But the best summer holiday movies are also about time itself. They’re about how we choose to use it and what comes out of those choices.
Before Sunrise, a joyous film about footloose youth, tellingly went on to spark a pair of excellent sequels that caught up with its lovers many years down the line. But that awareness of time was baked into the tale from the start. I agonised at some length over what should be number one on this list – and what probably swung it was the bittersweet flourish of Before Sunrise’s last moments, when Linklater’s camera beats back like a ghost to show us the places where Céline and Jesse were idling just a few hours before. The fountain and the ferris wheel. The forlorn little alley with the stacked wooden pallets. The Interrailers have already left them behind and moved on – except that they haven’t, not really. They’ll be haunting them happily for the rest of their lives.
