Murder, monsters, sex and food: the 10 best summer movies of all time

The Herald Scotland

09-07-2025

Steven Spielberg, 1975
The first summer blockbuster and still the best. Spielberg's film transformed Hollywood in terms of both content and delivery. Some might argue not for the better, of course, but this is a 'perfect engine' of a movie, helped, perversely, by the fact that the film-makers couldn't get the mechanical sharks to work. As a result, for large stretches of the film, Spielberg was forced to intimate rather than show. It didn't hurt at all. The menace of the unseen, accompanied by John Williams's ominous title music, was to be the making of the movie.
Fidel Castro called Jaws 'a Marxist picture.' Boris Johnson - showing his uncanny ability to be a blithering idiot at all times - said Amity Island's mayor was the hero of the movie by keeping the beaches open even when he knows there's a Great White snacking down on holidaymakers. For the rest of us it's about that combination of fear and excitement we get whilst sitting in the dark. It's the very why of cinema.
Oh and it's worth noting that this, perhaps the greatest of summer movies, was released in the UK on Boxing Day.
Summer Interlude
Ingmar Bergman, 1951
Bergman's reputation as the forbidding father figure of European art cinema rather glosses over his early films which contain the fleeting heat of Sweden in July and August. Summer with Monika (1952) was Bergman's breakthrough film and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) proved an inspiration for both Stephen Sondheim and Woody Allen, but let's go for Summer Interlude.
Told in flashback, it's the story of a ballerina (played by Maj Britt-Nilsson) remembering a teenage summer romance. Full of light and life, the result is a hazy, will-of-the-wisp movie that sparkles and glitters like sun on the water (Gunnar Fischer's black and white cinematography shimmers impeccably), before catching you out with a punch to the gut.
A Summer's Tale
Eric Rohmer, 1996
More teens in love. The cinema of French director Eric Rohmer can be damned with the epithet 'intelligent'. It's true his films are talky to the point of verbose and have a seemingly casual, almost offhand, approach to staging and notions of plot. What they require you to do is enter into his world.
But once you do they have a compelling pull to them. A Summer's Tale -set in Dinard on the Breton coast, which looks idyllic, quite frankly - follows Gaspard, a shy but handsome young man on holiday who becomes involved with not one but two young women whilst waiting for his girlfriend to join him. It's a movie about male stupidity and greed. Aren't most movies, come to think of it?
Body Heat
Lawrence Kasdan, 1981
William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (Image: unknown)
And talking of male stupidity … Lawrence Kasdan's amped up neo-noir set during a Florida heatwave hardly hid its debt to postwar cinema, and Double Indemnity in particular. But it was able to throw in a measure of late-20th century sexual candour into the mix. It was dismissed by some as a reheated (and heated up) throwback, another example of the Movie Brat generation's greater interest in movies than life. As if that was a bad thing.
And the truth is William Hurt and Kathleen Turner are both noir types (the priapic male and the femme fatale) and believable humans at the same time. I mean, it seems pretty credible that you'd at least consider committing murder if Kathleen Turner was asking you to. Or is that just me?
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee, 1989
New York summers take some bearing when the temperature rises. Funny and angry and thrilling all at once, Lee's incendiary drama may now be getting on for 40 years old, but its heat-flushed take on racial tensions in a Brooklyn neighbourhood still feels depressingly timely. You could say that it predicted what happened to George Floyd by more than two decades, but the truth is there have been a lot of George Floyds in America over the years.
Aftersun
Charlotte Wells, 2022
Paul Mescal in Aftersun (Image: unknown)
Powered by two knockout performances from Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio (just 12 when the film was released), Scottish director Charlotte Wells's debut might seem a slight, splindy thing to begin with; an account of a father and daughter's holiday in all its nothing-much ordinariness. But Wells's clear-eyed observation lets the drama grow organically and by the end of the film - when Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie plays over a nightclub scene - you can feel your heart clench in your chest. A little masterpiece.
My Neighbour Totoro
Hayao Miyazaki, 1988
I have a confession to make. I'm not a big fan of Pixar movies. Oh, I can see the craft and care that goes into them. But that never seemed enough. And I always thought the Toy Story movies in particular seemed far more aimed at Boomer parents lamenting their kids growing up than the kids themselves.
You can't say the same of the Studio Ghibli movies which are films aimed at children and are full of the mystery, strangeness, surprise and limpid beauty of childhood.
My Neighbour Totoro may be the simplest of the Ghibli films, a story of two young girls spending summer in the country to be near their ailing mother only to encounter fantastic woodland creatures. But it has a charm to it that is beguiling. Here, summer - and childhood, for that matter - is reconfigured as dreamtime.
Rear Window
Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
James Stewart in Rear Window (Image: unknown)
'Hot town, summer in the city …' Jimmy Stewart is trapped in his apartment in a wheelchair with a broken leg. At least he has the solace of the occasional visit by Grace Kelly (looking like she has just walked off a Vogue cover) and snooping on his neighbours. Only thing is, the more he watches the more he is convinced one of them might have done away with his wife. The result? Hitchcock's puritanism and voyeurism both in plain view
La Piscine
Jacques Deray, 1969
Murder and Mediterranean sun go well together. Deray's late 1960s film stars Alain Delon and Romy Schneider at their most beautiful (which is saying something). They play a couple who are languorously spending their summer in a villa in the south of France. It's a life that - like them - looks perfect. But the more we see the more we realise there is something not quite right. And when Schneider's ex-lover turns up with his teenage daughter (played by Jane Birkin), things take something of a turn. It will not end well. Luca Guadagnino's 2015 film A Bigger Splash, starring Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes, is loosely based on Deray's original. Both movies capture the sense of rot hiding in the bud of summer.
Mid-August Lunch
Gianni Di Gregorio, 2008
The inspiration for the recent James McArdle film Four Mothers, Mid-August Lunch seemed an unlikely debut for Di Gregorio, the writer of the uncompromising Italian mafia drama Gomorrah. It is essentially an OAP sleepover movie. Di Gregorio himself stars in the film as a son (called Gianni, just to make it simple) who is looking after his elderly mother in a stickily hot Rome. Fate dictates that he is soon looking after another three old women too. It's a film about food and Roman sunshine and love and tolerance, and it's full of sweetness and light. That's a recipe for a perfect summer, come to think of it.