SUMMER MOVIE HOUSE
strip, sunburn, cut some flowers, climb into clean sheets, and start a film. it's summertime.
FYI: This post is 1000% too long for email — now’s a good chance to get the substack app and use that handy SAVE FOR LATER button, because you’ll want to come back to this…
all images courtesy of SHOTDECK
I’m unconvinced there’s any better feeling than slightly sunburnt shoulders under crisp, clean sheets on the first days of summer.
Windows open, light breeze coming through, you’ve just been to the beach, maybe had a little soft serve after. It’s still the beginning of summer so the weather turns in the evening. Pull on that sweater and start a film. Phone off, street sounds wafting in, rest those tired swimmer’s legs.
After getting back from the sea you were daydreaming in the shower, maybe thinking of someone to touch your newly tanned skin, kiss the salt away (or more accurately, massage some aloe vera into your shoulder blades). These are the films to keep that romance going and continue to rest your mind (because nothing kills the imagination like scrolling through Netflix for 2 hours before giving up and going on Tiktok for the rest of the night)
UPDATED REGULARLY !
ROMA (2018) ALFONSO CUARON
In my life, there was before Roma and after Roma. Cuaron’s semi-autobiographical portrait of the neighborhood he grew up in features a troubled, but well-off family in an even more troubled, yet vibrant and beautiful Mexico City. Cuaron’s lens finds a luminous subject in a young indigenous maid named Cleo, as the family dynamics come into focus in the background. This bright, gorgeously filmed picture treats her with heartrending sensitivity. Her days, as she switches between colonial Spanish and Mexico’s native Mixtec, are filled with unending, often grueling housework and moments of radical kindness and love. Cuaron’s immaculate film holds many truths and felt, in a year where white savior slop Green Book won the oscar for best picture, like a breath of fresh air and a hopeful new direction for cinema streamers. (Netflix Originals used to mean something 🥲)
Watch on Netflix.
PURPLE NOON (plein soleil) (1960)
The first film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Painfully gorgeous European escapism, and not “too french” as Robert Eggers would say. Alain Delon (R.I.P) and the beautiful Maurice Ronet are a great foil here.
Watch on Criterion, Apple TV or Amazon Prime.
PS: Criterion has an amazing collection of Ripley films on now:
Wicked charmer, sociopath, con artist, and killer, Tom Ripley is one of literature and cinema’s most enduring and enigmatic antiheroes. The slippery and seductive schemer at the center of Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated series of crime novels, Ripley has captivated filmmakers across generations, continents, and genres in a number of acclaimed film adaptations, proving an irresistible cipher for directors, actors, and viewers alike. As played by Alain Delon (PURPLE NOON), Dennis Hopper (THE AMERICAN FRIEND), Matt Damon (THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY), and John Malkovich (RIPLEY’S GAME), he continuously shape-shifts—by turns charismatic, chilling, queer, cultured, calculating, monstrous, and strangely sympathetic—becoming a dark-sided mirror of the anxieties and desires of his surroundings.
C’MON C’MON (2021) Mike Mills
This takes place over a few seasons but the warmth and simple beauty of this film makes it a perfect summer afternoon watch. Joaquin Phoenix is charged with looking after his nephew, and the quiet, earnest relationship that blossoms is surprising and devastating.
Watch on YoutubeTV, rent on Prime or Apple.
LA PISCINE (1969) Jacques Deray and I don’t give a f*ck what Richard Brody has to say
This is a saucy film. If looks could kill, opening weekend would be a mass slaughter. Romy Schneider looking supremely bangable and continues so even as a 23-year-old Jane Birkin comes into the picture. I can’t even talk about sad boy Alain Delon here… (Watch alone) There’s no denying how marvelously enjoyable this film is even if the characters are yes, underdeveloped. Luca Guadignino’s 2015 remake attempted to deepen the psychological games between these characters and IMO just took the fun out of it. But we love Dakota Johnson, so go for it if you can stomach Tilda Swinton today. If not, watch the 1969 version and behold Jane Birkin in a mini skirt and her iconic bucket basket bag
Watch on Max, Hulu, Youtube TV, Prime, and Roku
THE LOST DAUGHTER (2021) Maggie Gyllenhaal
What happens when memories haunt your holiday alone? And forces, whether real or imagined, seem out to get you? This is a brilliant movie that authentically captures the biting social commentary of Ferrante’s source material. Gyllenhaal’s swap of Americans for Italians makes perfect sense and sustains the class dynamics present in Ferrante’s book. This slim, tense film asks with no prescriptive intention, what makes a mother? What happens when a woman is an unnatural mother? (FYI Jessie Buckley is unbelievably hot as a younger Olivia Colman —— that scene where she has phone sex in Italian to her lover on the phone while her daughters play on the playground lives rent-free in my mind)
Watch on Netflix
PAULINE A LA PLAGE (1983) Éric Rohmer
No one does a thoughtfully sensual, sun-drenched psychological study like Rohmer. He could have made 1000 movies like this and I would endlessly rewatch them all. You’ll want to take a swan dive into every frame of this scrumptious European summer.
Watch on Netflix or Mubi
BEFORE SUNRISE (1995) Richard Linklater
A perfect film.
Rent on Prime or AppleTV
LE MEPRIS (CONTEMPT) (1963) Jean-Luc Godard
To be a Godard woman… Brigitte Bardot is electric in this film, and somehow isn’t even the most notable eye-candy present in this visually luxurious film. Godard’s odd detour into more commercial filmmaking, this is still distinctly French New Wave and formally subversive. You can draw a straight line from LE MEPRIS to something like, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, for example. Even while playing nice with Hollywood, Godard takes a more cutting look at the industry, playing up and exposing its vapidity on his own terms. Ironically, ended up on the Sight and Sound best 100 movies of all time list.
Watch on Prime or Roku.
BRIGHT STAR (2009) Jane Campion
Before she made POWER OF THE DOG, Jane Campion was perfecting the female gaze with BRIGHT STAR, a tender love story taking place in 1818 that imagines the passionate affair of John Keats and a high-spirited young neighbor. (i love a sexually-tense period drama with some random actors you’ve never ever heard of)
SUMMER WITH MONIKA (1953) Ingrid Bergman
I adored this film and though it of course all goes south and becomes a tale of morality (this is a Bergman after all), it treats youth and summer love seriously with a lot of respect. If you wanted to see sort of what a Wes Anderson/Bergman collab would look like, here you are. Monika is dreamy and erotic, in spite of her naivete.
Rent on Prime or AppleTV
SUMMERTIME (1955) David Lean
This is an all-time comfort film for me. Jane Hudson (Katharine Hepburn) is a prim, successful, working woman in her late 40s who elects to take a holiday in Venice on her own. She’s never married, and instead has spent her life becoming insanely fashionable and self-determined. But ALAS, we women can’t have it all… We watch as Hepburn works through conflicting feelings of piety, loneliness, and modesty as she experiences a girl-like romance with a more experienced Italian man. It’s charming, adorable and simplistically romantic. There’s a small amount of eye-rolling for Hepburn’s virgin/spinster trope, but one, even with that this feels like a radical concept for the 50s, and two, Hepburn is so damn authentic that she cuts through any of that awkwardness. She was actually in her late forties when she filmed this, far from being forgotten in “old age,” she was still a star. I also found it deeply relatable as it captured the feelings and uncertainty of someone who struggled against moral upbringings when it comes to sex and romance. You also get your bang for your buck when it comes to city shots of Venice, gorgeously shot from head to toe. As David Erlich wrote “Lean, as always, sure knows how to shoot the shit out of trains”
Watch on Criterion and Max.
LA BELLE SAISON (2015) Catherine Corsini
What CAROL did for Christmas lesbians, LA BELLE SAISON does for summer lesbians. Beautiful, sexy, unbelievably tender, chef’s kiss.
Watch on Prime.
THE DARJEELING LIMITED (2007) Wes Anderson
My husband and his brothers aren’t nearly estranged enough (or at all), but they deserve a holiday like this anyways.
Watch on Hulu or Disney+
A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951) George Stevens
Montgomery Clift 😍
“Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor make for one of the most swoon-inducing screen couples of the 1950s in this deluxe, multi-Oscar-winning adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY. Clift delivers perhaps his greatest performance as a poor but enterprising young man caught between two women—a factory worker (Shelley Winters) and a glamorous socialite (Taylor)—as he attempts to climb his way to the top.” Watch on Criterion
THE RUM DIARY (2011) Bruce Robinson
Stick with me here, although this is not exactly a GOOD movie, its absolutely dripping with summer, escapism, and Hemingway-lost generation swagginess based on Hunter S. Thompson’s somewhat autobiographical story about being a journalist in San Juan. Also isn’t it bonkers to see Amber Heard and Johnny Depp in a film together? A piece of modern Hollywood history.
Rent on Prime or Apple.
THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995) Clint Eastwood
Midwestern summer dreams. This is a quiet and sneakily profound film masquerading as a chick flick, a fully engrossing romance, well-worth a watch anytime. For anyone who has ever been deeply in love, and yet still knows that there is more love than is possible to experience in one lifetime.
Rent on Prime or Apple.
CLAIRE’S KNEE (ou Le Genou de Claire)(1970) Éric Rohmer
I need to live inside this film. The European escapism is at its finest here in Rohmer’s “moral tale” in which he explores emotional manipulation for the fulfillment of fetishization. But it’s not all as heavy handed as that, it feels authentic, lived-in, and the women always end up on top. Rohmer’s re-centering of feminine power makes his quiet masterpieces legendary and evergreen, especially as they work to hold the mirror to man’s primitive nature. Also, GOD is this film beautiful.
CLAIRE'S KNEE is a charming, serene, sun-bright movie; it calls up lazy memories of adolescence, and makes one long for summer holidays and months in the country. It's a lovely film and an unusually civilized film—if one uses "civilized" to describe a particular blend of harmony and restraint—and I enjoyed it very much.
Pauline Kael (March 20, 1971)
Watch on Criterion, rent on Apple or Prime.
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961) Elia Kazan
Young Warren Beatty, say no more.
“Elia Kazan’s delirious drama of sexual repression stars Natalie Wood (in one of her finest performances) and Warren Beatty (smoldering in his film debut) as two teenage lovers in 1928 Kansas whose internal conflicts over intimacy and sex—learned from their overbearing parents—threaten to thwart their hopes for happiness. Daringly scripted by playwright William Inge to expose the hypocrisies of small-town morality, SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS roils with the emotional intensity of anguished adolescence.” Watch on Criterion
THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (2004) Wes Anderson
The deeper you go, the weirder life gets. My unofficial, unpopular first choice pick out of Wes Anderson’s oeuvre, any time of year. It’s unobjectionably the best. Impeccable style, brilliant source material, perfect cast, immaculate ratio of Anderson’s dollhouse set-building style and real, lived-in environments, highly-playable soundtrack, and chaotically hilarious storyline.
Watch on Hulu and Disney+.
The Last Picture Show (1971) Peter Bogdanovich
This movie is absolutely soaked with nostalgia. I feel like I can hear Linklater weeping when I watch this. A 22-year-old Jeff Bridges steals the show here in this picture about childhood innocence and loss thereof, and hard living in their dying Texas town.
Rent on Prime or Apple
AFTERSUN (2022) Charlotte Wells
Charlotte Wells bottled up the nostalgia of watching home movies, particularly in search of something, and mixed in the eerie knowledge of the slipperiness of memory to make this perfect, heartbreaking film.
Watch on Max or Roku
I’M STILL HERE (2024) Walter Salles
There’s a review of My Year of Magical Thinking in Time, in which Lev Grossman says “To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost.” Before Rubens Paiva’s forced disappearance by the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil, Salles allows you to settle in with the Paiva’s. In a brilliant and crushing first 30 minutes of this movie, we are made to feel welcome in the Paiva’s happy home, we see the five children scamper and scream and sing to one another in childhood ecstasy, dancing in and out of their father’s arms. We feel that we are the one left holding the Super 8, shooting as our siblings map out our future, argue about who gets the bigger room in the house we are building together. Salles goes further, as, to make Eunice Paiva’s bottomless grief real, he showed us what it was like not only to know, but to be adored by Rubens, a life swept out of existence in an instant by a ruthless dictatorship.
ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953) William Wyler
Ain’t nothing like a good summer romance.
DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) Terrence Malick
Shot exclusively during golden hour, this movie is a poetic masterpiece, a summer evening encapsulated. I copped a ticket to see this on the big screen at the Brattle theatre in Boston right after the 4k restoration and damn.
THE GRADUATE (1967) Mike Nichols
It’s summertime, you’ve just graduated college, now what do you plan to do with the rest of your life?
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021) Joachim Trier
Because what else is summertime for than second-guessing every decision you’ve ever made in order to find yourself?
Rent on Prime or Apple
“Okay well what if you’re in not in Maine?” I hear my Cool City Girls saying…
True, true, the small-town or European escapism thing might not have the same kind of magic when you’re not in coastal Maine in June with its warm days, cold ocean, and perfect-sleeping-temperature nights. Here are some films with a taut tension and sharper edge; whether thats in drama, horror or just the rating. For when you’re sweating, eating popsicles to cool down, avoiding the subway, and either dressing slutty or dressing like Adam Sandler. Films for romanticizing the carnal city intimacy of shared body smells and stripping down on whatever patch of grass is available to you.
DOG DAYS (2001) Ulrich Seidl
Rich in symbolism and metaphor and just f*cking hot. Vignettes of the lives of several residents of a Vienna suburb during a heat wave. Watch to feel better about your relationships and life in general.
Rent on Prime, watch on Kanopy or Mubi (might just be Intl)
DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) Spike Lee
It’s the hottest day of the summer, and tensions are rising surrounding the racial reckoning of a white-owned pizza parlor in Black Bed-Stuy. A masterclass in critical thinking and also, steeze.
Watch on Netflix or Prime.
SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE (1989) Steven Soderbergh
Summer days are for saucy marriage dramas.
Andie McDowell 🥰
Rent on Apple or Prime.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003) Bong Joon Ho
Summer movie? Perhaps. MEMORIES OF MURDER will feel more like a ghost tale heard ‘round a campfire, when you consider the disturbing source material.
Watch on Tubi or rent on Prime and Apple.
ALICE IN THE CITIES (1974) Wim Wenders
Do you believe that one person can change your fate? This is C’mon C’mon if Wim Wenders made it.
Watch on Criterion, rent on Prime or Apple.
SUPERBAD (2007) Greg Mottola
Summer’s about to start, there’s just one last little thing to button up…
… AND BOOKSMART (2019) Olivia Wilde
And while we’re at it…
DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)
Just to complete the trilogy.
RED ROCKET (2021) Sean Baker
Mikey Saber, American entrepreneur. Don’t believe the haters that this one of Baker’s is not worth seeing. It had a lackluster reception but IMO this is Baker at some of his most sexually devious, with no heroes, no good guys, and a harsh, unflinching portrayal of adult (or barely adult) life under the poverty line.
Rent on Apple or Prime
MIDSOMMAR (2019) Ari Aster
Taking place on the summer solstice, MIDSOMMAR is a fun casual movie about a boys vacay where one of the girlfriends crashes the trip and things get crazy!
WILD THINGS (1998) John McNaughton
Young & hot Denise Richards and more plot twists than you can count! What else do you want from me?
WATER LILIES (2007) Celine Sciamma
From the director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Water Lilies is a sensitive, tantalizing tale of two girls on the cusp of womanhood. Of course its brilliant and heartbreaking, and Celine’s concept of feminine desire is deeply personal.
Watch on Criterion or rent on Prime
LA CIÉNAGA (2001) Lucrecia Martel
A brilliant voice that put Argentine cinema firmly on the map, LA CIENAGA is a scrappy, gorgeously shot, and cinematically radical film.
“Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, and one of the great contemporary film debuts.”
Watch on Criterion.
ADDED TO REGULARLY!! My letterboxd list.
This list had me adding every single film to my notebook...thank you for this!