Summer has a feeling unlike any other season. The longer days, the lighter schedule, the freedom of knowing that somewhere, someone is on vacation. School is out. The week feels shorter. The possibilities feel endless. It is the season of open roads, late nights, and the kind of spontaneity that happens when the pressure lifts.
These are the ones for that feeling. For the long evenings and the slow afternoons and the nights when you want to feel like you are somewhere beautiful, even if you are just on your couch. Sun-drenched and free in spirit, adventurous in setting, and sometimes morally complicated in ways that linger long after the credits roll. The kind of films that make you want to book a flight, fall in love, hit the open road — or simply sit with something richer than you expected on a Tuesday night.
Here’s our list. Pour something cold, and in no particular order, press play.
Triangle of Sadness (2022), directed by Ruben Östlund, is the most uncomfortable dinner party you will ever attend — and also one of the funniest films of the decade. A luxury yacht, an impossibly beautiful couple, a drunk Marxist captain, and a very bad storm. The Palme d’Or-winning satire of wealth and class starts as comedy and ends somewhere much more brutal. The sun is always shining. Everything is rotting underneath.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006), directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, is the road trip film that makes you cry and laugh within the same scene. A deeply dysfunctional family drives a VW bus across the American Southwest so their seven-year-old can compete in a beauty pageant. One of the warmest, funniest, most human films of the 2000s. The ending is pure joy.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), directed by Anthony Minghella, is the dark side of the summer dream. Tom Ripley is sent to 1950s Italy to retrieve a wealthy young man and becomes consumed by the life he finds there — the sun, the beauty, the ease of it all. Positano, Rome, and Venice have never looked more gorgeous or more dangerous. The film understands that desire for a life that is not yours is its own kind of violence
Call Me by Your Name (2017), directed by Luca Guadagnino, is summer distilled into cinema. Set in the Italian countryside in 1983, it follows seventeen-year-old Elio and the older graduate student who comes to stay at his family’s villa. What unfolds is an awakening — sensory, sexual, emotional — told through peaches and Bach and the particular ache of wanting something you cannot keep. The film stays with you the way a summer does: as feeling more than memory.
Before Sunrise (1995) is proof that two people talking can be the most cinematic thing in the world. Jesse and Celine meet on a train and spend one night in Vienna — wandering, talking, falling. Richard Linklater understood that the knowledge of an ending makes every moment matter more. One of the most romantic films ever made, and it cost almost nothing to produce.
Moonrise Kingdom (2012), directed by Wes Anderson, is summer as a storybook — precisely composed, melancholy underneath the whimsy, and genuinely moving. Two twelve-year-olds run away together on a New England island in 1965, and the whole island is looking for them. Anderson understands that childhood summers are both the most vivid and most fleeting thing — and that first love, however brief, leaves a permanent mark.
Thelma & Louise (1991), directed by Ridley Scott, is the definitive road trip film and one of the most radical films Hollywood ever produced. Two women leave for a weekend away and end up somewhere else entirely — free, dangerous, and entirely alive. The American Southwest has never looked more beautiful or more vast. A film about liberation that does not flinch from what liberation costs.
Amélie (2001), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is Paris as a state of mind — quirky, saturated, endlessly inventive. Amélie Poulain decides to secretly improve the lives of the people around her while quietly neglecting her own happiness. One of the most visually distinctive and life-affirming films ever made. A reminder that the world is full of small wonders if you are paying attention.
Challengers (2024) is tennis as foreplay. A love triangle spanning thirteen years, desire and ambition so intertwined they become indistinguishable, Zendaya commanding every frame. Luca Guadagnino made the most kinetic film of 2024 — the one that made summer feel like a competitive sport. The soundtrack alone is worth the watch.
Red Rocket (2021), directed by Sean Baker, is Texas summer heat made into cinema. A washed-up porn star returns to his small Gulf Coast hometown, broke and charming, and immediately starts working every angle available to him. Baker shoots the American landscape — strip malls, trailers, the relentless sun — with a beauty that makes you question your own aesthetic loyalties. Funny, uncomfortable, and completely alive.
City of God (2002), directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, is one of the most viscerally alive films ever made. Set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro across three decades, it follows children who grow up inside a world of violence, ambition, and survival — told with a kinetic energy that makes you feel the heat of every frame. The Brazilian summer here is not scenic. It is relentless, beautiful, and completely unsparing.
Luca (2021), directed by Enrico Casarosa, is Pixar at its most Italian and its most joyful. Two sea monsters spend a summer on the Italian Riviera in human form, discovering pasta, Vespas, and friendship. The lightest film on this list and one of the most beautiful — a love letter to the kind of summer that exists in childhood memory, golden and slightly unreal. Do not let the animation fool you. It will make adults feel things.
Mid90s (2018) is a coming-of-age film shot in the aspect ratio of memory. A thirteen-year-old in Los Angeles finds his way into a group of skaters one summer and discovers — through them — who he might become. Shot on 16mm by Jonah Hill with a warmth that feels nostalgic in real time. The film captures something specific about that age: the need to belong, the risk of it, the way one summer can rearrange everything.
Mamma Mia! (2008), directed by Phyllida Lloyd, earns its place on this list entirely on the strength of its joy. A Greek island, ABBA, Meryl Streep singing in overalls — the most unapologetically fun film here and the one you need when the slow burns have burned you out. Not everything has to be complicated. Sometimes summer is just this: dancing on a dock, the Aegean behind you, not a care in the world.
Dazed and Confused (1993) is the last day of school in 1976 Texas, stretched into an afternoon and evening that feel eternal. No real plot. Just kids, cars, beer, and the specific freedom of a summer night with nowhere to be. Richard Linklater captures something true about adolescence — that the best nights are the ones that happen by accident. Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson is one of cinema’s great supporting characters.
Chungking Express (1994) is Hong Kong in perpetual summer motion. Two parallel love stories, two lonely cops, a city that never slows down. Wong Kar-wai shot it with a restless handheld immediacy that makes everything feel like it is happening right now — less interested in plot than in the texture of urban longing. Faye Wong plays California Dreamin’ on repeat. You will not forget it.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) is sun-drenched and morally unresolved in the best way. Two American women spend a summer in Barcelona and fall into the orbit of a passionate Spanish painter — and eventually his volatile ex-wife. Penélope Cruz won an Oscar for a reason. Woody Allen understood that the heat makes everything feel inevitable. A film about what we want versus what we can actually live with.
Y Tu Mamá También (2001), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is a road trip that becomes something else entirely. Two teenage boys and an older woman drive across Mexico toward a beach that may or may not exist. Sensual, funny, politically layered, and quietly devastating by the end. The film that proved Cuarón was one of the most important directors of his generation.
Do the Right Thing (1989) is the hottest day of the year in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and everything that happens when heat and tension and history finally reach a breaking point. Spike Lee made one of the most important American films ever — formally daring, politically urgent, and still completely current. Summer is not always beautiful. Sometimes it is this.
A Bigger Splash (2015), directed by Luca Guadagnino, is a volcanic Italian island, a rock star in self-imposed silence, and a visit from an ex-lover who cannot help but detonate everything. No one understands the particular heat of Italian summer and the violence it can produce better than Guadagnino. Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes are extraordinary. Deeply uncomfortable in the best way.
Spirited Away (2001), directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is the most celebrated animated film ever made. A ten-year-old girl stumbles into a spirit world while her parents are transformed into pigs — what follows is a dream logic quest through bathhouses, rivers, and creatures that defy description. Miyazaki does not explain his world. He simply immerses you in it.
Grease (1978) is summer love as myth. Danny and Sandy’s end-of-summer romance, complicated by the return to high school and everything that comes with it. Randal Kleiser made something enormously fun and enormously singable — and if you look at it slightly sideways, a surprisingly sharp portrait of 1950s teenage conformity. The kind of film everyone has seen and everyone can quote.
Life of Pi (2012) — a boy adrift on the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger. Visually one of the most stunning films ever made. Ang Lee won the Oscar for Best Director. The ocean, the light, the isolation — it is genuinely cinematic summer in a completely different way from anything else on the list.
Midnight in Paris (2011), directed by Woody Allen, is a love letter to nostalgia and the city that inspires it most. A Hollywood screenwriter in Paris, quietly miserable, discovers that at midnight he is transported to the 1920s — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, all of it rendered with warmth and wit. Paris at night has never looked more like a dream you do not want to wake from.
Midsommar (2019), directed by Ari Aster for the brave — Swedish summer that never gets dark, a relationship quietly falling apart, and a folk horror ritual that escalates with terrible beauty. The most visually stunning horror film of the last decade. Not for everyone. Absolutely worth it for those it is for.
—
Cover via NEON
A Dwell Refine Series · The Watch List
Related Dwelling
Love, As Seen Through Film: A Valentine’s Day Watchlist for Staying In
A Mountain of Stories: A Century of Paramount and What to Watch on Paramount+ Right Now
4 Responses