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Best Summer Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of summer cinema — measured across 1,711 indexed frames from 26 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Summer films over-index on lake, teenager and dog — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Call Me By Your Name (2017)

    Luca GuadagninoDP Sayombhu MukdeepromIMDb 7.8TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, is a sensual and transcendent tale of first love, based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman. It's the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, and Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a precocious 17-year-old young man, spends his days in his family's 17th-century villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading, and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Elio enjoys a close relationship with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture, and his mother Annella (Amira Casar), a translator, who favor him with the fruits of high culture in a setting that overflows with natural delights. While Elio's sophistication and intellectual gifts suggest he is already a fully-fledged adult, there is much that yet remains innocent and unformed about him, particularly about matters of the heart. One day, Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old American college graduate student working on his doctorate, arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of the setting, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will alter their lives forever.

  2. 2

    It (2017)

    Andy MuschiettiDP Chung Chung-hoonIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    In the Town of Derry, the local kids are disappearing one by one. In a place known as 'The Barrens', a group of seven kids are united by their horrifying and strange encounters with an evil clown and their determination to kill It.

  3. 3

    Friday the 13th (1980)

    Sean S. CunninghamDP Barry AbramsIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    In 1957, a young boy named Jason drowns in a lake near Camp Crystal Lake. The next year, two counselors are murdered. In 1980, a descendant of the original owners reopens Camp Crystal Lake with some counselors' help. The counselors gets killed one by one by a mysterious person. Could it be Jason, out for revenge?

  4. 4

    Robot Dreams (2023)

    Pablo BergerIMDb 7.6TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    A lonely dog's friendship with his robot companion takes a sad turn when an unexpected malfunction forces him to abandon Robot at the beach. Will Dog ever meet Robot again?

  5. 5

    The Quiet Girl (2022)

    Colm BairéadDP Kate McCulloughIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Set in 1981, this film tells the story of a young girl, Cáit, who is sent away for the summer from her dysfunctional family to live with "her mother's people". These are Seán and Eibhlín Cinnsealach; a middle-aged couple she has never met. Slowly, in the care of this couple, Cáit blossoms and discovers a new way of living, but in this house where affection grows and there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers one.

  6. 6

    The Florida Project (2017)

    Sean BakerDP Alexis ZabéIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    Halley lives with her six year old daughter Moonee in a budget motel along one of the commercial strips catering to the Walt Disney World tourist clientele outside Orlando, Florida. Halley, who survives largely on welfare, has little respect for people, especially those who cross her, it an attitude that she has passed down to Moonee, who curses and gives the finger like her mother. Although the motel's policy is not to allow long term rentals, Bobby, the motel manager, has made arrangements for people like Halley to live there while not undermining the policy as he realizes that many such tenants have no place to go otherwise. Halley, Moonee and Moonee's friends, who live in the motel or others like it along the strip and who she often drags into her disruptive pranks, are often the bane of Bobby's existence, but while dealing with whatever problem arises, Bobby has a soft spot especially for the children and thus, by association, their parents, as he knows that Moonee and others like her are just children acting like a children under whatever guidance they have, Moonee who has less guidance than most. Although there are some lines which he will not tolerate to be crossed, Bobby lets most of the disruptive things that they do go, largely as long as it does not affect the bread and butter of the motel, namely the tourist trade. The summer in this collective is presented, when Moonee and her friends, such as Scooty, are out of school and are left largely to their own devices while self-absorbed Halley does whatever she wants, often just staying in the room watching TV. Halley is supposed to look after Scooty, the son of Halley's friend Ashley, they who live in the unit immediately underneath Halley and Moonee's, while Ashley is at work at a local diner. In turn, Ashley pilfers cooked meals from the diner to feed Halley, Moonee and Scooty. Over the course of the summer, Halley systematically begins to alienate one by one the people who are her unofficial support by responding with that disrespect to anything she feels is against her. As such, Halley begins to take more and more extreme measures to maintain the life she leads with Moonee.

  7. 7

    500 Days of Summer (2009)

    Marc WebbDP Eric SteelbergIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    After it looks as if she's left his life for good this time, Tom Hansen reflects back on the just over one year that he knew Summer Finn. For Tom, it was love at first sight when she walked into the greeting card company where he worked, she the new administrative assistant. Soon, Tom knew that Summer was the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Although Summer did not believe in relationships or boyfriends - in her assertion, real life will always ultimately get in the way - Tom and Summer became more than just friends. Through the trials and tribulations of Tom and Summer's so-called relationship, Tom could always count on the advice of his two best friends, McKenzie and Paul. However, it is Tom's adolescent sister, Rachel, who is his voice of reason. After all is said and done, Tom is the one who ultimately has to make the choice to listen or not.

  8. 8

    Brokeback Mountain (2005)

    Ang LeeDP Rodrigo PrietoIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →

    Their acquaintance began on the warm summer of 1963, when cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, ended up on the sheep farm of Joe Aguirre in Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming while looking for work. Under unexpected circumstances, little by little, the two men developed an intimate relationship that turned into a profound but secret bond, right under the nose of their families. However, love, and its many faces, is eternal. Who can stop love, life's ultimate truth?

  9. 9

    Stealing Beauty (1996)

    Bernardo BertolucciDP Darius KhondjiIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    For 20 years many visitors have come to the villa on an Italian hilltop owned by an English artist. Lucy, a 19-year-old American, was last there four years ago and wants to meet up again with the young Italian who kissed her and corresponded for a while. And she has brought the diary of her late mother filled with enigmatic poems that suggest Lucy was conceived on that hilltop. Lucy wants to find out if Daddy is the Italian war correspondent who wrote to her mother for 20 years. Then again Daddy could be the dying English playwright in residence or the artist who uses a chainsaw on tree trunks for his sculptures. The three, of course, have no idea that Lucy is there to solve a mystery. They, the artist's wife, daughter of that wife and the daughter's American lover are most intrigued by Lucy's virginity.

  10. 10

    Atonement (2007)

    Joe WrightDP Seamus McGarveyIMDb 7.8TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    When Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), thirteen-years-old and an aspiring writer, sees her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) at the fountain in front of the family estate, she misinterprets what is happening, thus setting into motion a series of misunderstandings and a childish pique that will have lasting repercussions for all of them. Robbie is the son of a family servant toward whom the family has always been kind. They paid for his time at Cambridge and now he plans on going to medical school. After the fountain incident, Briony reads a letter intended for Cecilia and concludes that Robbie is a deviant. When her cousin Lola (Juno Temple) is raped, she tells the Police that it was Robbie she saw committing the deed.

What summer films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a summer frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — lake is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • lake8.1×
  • teenager5.1×
  • dog4.8×
  • bicycle4.2×
  • girl3.5×
  • trees3.3×
  • tank top2.8×
  • foliage2.6×

How summer films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate summer from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 56%naturalvs 43% baseline
  • 87%eye levelvs 69% baseline
  • 52%dayvs 42% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Summer of Sam (1999) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,711 frames from 26 films carrying the summer label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/summer

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used