Summer isn’t summer without some sweltering action. The heat permeates not just our skins and our hearts, but also the film world. That’s why we have gone through our archives and selected 10 dirty movies that use the brightest season of the year as a narrative device, or even a character per se. These hot days have the power to affect how characters feel, behave, love and make decisions. The outcome can be gorgeous and magnificent, but sometimes the stories can lapse into tragedy. There is little doubt that the temperatures have a major impact on how we live our lives, as well as on how films reach their final denouement.

The movies below are listed in alphabetical order. Just click on the film title in order to accede to each individual dirty review.

…

.

1. Animal (Sofia Exarchou, 2024):

It’s early summer, and a group of young animateurs from different countries – Kazakhstan, Russia, the Baltic states, etc – arrives at the Mirage Hotel in Greece. Kalia (Dimitra Vlagopoulou), a slightly older dancer with a gorgeous body and long blond hair, greets them. Polish Eva (Flomaria Papadaki) stands out amongst the new arrivals. Kalia and Eva quickly develop a strong friendship, based on female mutual understanding, support and assistance.

Kalia tells Eva that she wanted to be like Madonna ever since she was a child. Indeed, this fragile woman knows how to light up the audience. She understand what the guests want, and relays her experience to the group of dancers. Audiences will forever remember the hard work of animateurs. The animalistic energy that they have to put into their performances has a major impact on both their physical and their psychological health. Animal features professional dancers with little acting experience. This is an uplifting film, nevertheless. There’s abundant positive energy. The outcome is both inspiring and energising. In addition to the sweltering sun, the bright choreography, Animal also features Vassilia Rozana’s glitzy costume design.

.

2. Endless Summer Syndrome (Kaveh Daneshmand, 2023):

Prosperous French lawyer Delphine (Sophie Colon) seemingly has it all. She’s married to Antoine (Matheo Capelli), an altruistic husband who adores their adopted children as much as she does. Proud of her “multinational” family, she spends her days sunbathing, swimming and enjoying cocktails with her children. While watching her husband and children laugh at a private joke, she receives a disturbing phone call, one that intimates that her husband is enjoying a romantic rendez-vous with one of her kids.

Like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) before it, Endless Summer Syndrome details a woman’s nervous breakdown over the course of a summer weekend. By the time she gets to Sunday, Delphine has abandoned all pretence of happiness, and elects to confront her husband directly. It’s not like her to be passive aggressive: Not only does she tolerate her son’s marijuana habit, she also partakes in it from time to time. Antoine, by contrast, seems happier to spend his evenings reading Jack Kerouac, or playing scrabble. How could a man of his quiet nature do something so garish and destructive?

.

3. Fez Summer ’55 (Abdelhaï Laraki, 2023):

The old medina of Moroccan city Fez, a lattice of narrow streets where there is room for no more than pedestrian traffic. Or, to 11-year-old boy Kamal (Ayman Driwi), a network of rooftops and walkways allowing him to go anywhere. His freedom on the top of the city stands in sharp contrast to the country’s political reality: occupied by France, with their police patrolling the streets. The locals either keep their heads down or agitate for the return of their exiled ruler, Sultan Mohammed V. The story is very much told from Kamal’s point-of-view. He is at once possessed of a child’s enthusiasm for life and, from his rooftop vantage point, able to see things not seen by most adults. Yet, he is hampered by his immaturity and lack of understanding of what’s really going on.

While she is still young and possessed of that sense of optimism for the future that young people have before the realities of life grind it out of them, the female character has a far stronger grasp of the ramifications of the political situation than the male, and indeed is involved with the city’s underground network of freedom fighters. Into which the young boy is drawn, partly because of his rooftop navigation abilities. There are also glimpses of networks designed for surreptitiously getting guns or written information from a to b, with Aicha lifting up a potted plant, earth, roots and all, to deposit whatever she’s delivering in the pot underneath for collection by someone else later.

The film plays out as a fascinating picture of a city inside a country on the verge of independence from its occupiers, with its rooftops, alleyways and private courtyards assuming great significance because of the specific urban layout. If anything, it’s rendered still more compelling for being seen through the eyes of a child who doesn’t always fully understand what’s going on and the true significance of events unfolding around him.

.

4. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat, 2023):

The action takes place in a sultry French summer. Anne (Léa Drucker) is a child protection lawyer. She has a comfortable life with her husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), his son 17-year-old Theo (Samuel Kircher) and their two adoptive twin daughters, aged around five. Theo is unpleasant and unruly, however the family manage to forge a barely peaceful existence. Anne and Pierre have a sex life, if not entirely satisfactory. At one point Anne tells him: “you no longer have the touch of youth, but I’m a gerontophile”. Not quite the compliment a man would like to hear.

Anne begins an affair with her stepson, thereby subverting the power dynamics of gender. What follows is an unbalanced game of cat-and-mouse, as both Anne and Theo fight for their place in a family no longer able to exist in its current form. The female becomes the oppressor. And she is prepared to incorporate the demeaning tactics that she learnt in court into her own private life. She domesticates the angelic looking and demonic acting adolescent. The hunter gets captured by the game. Ultimately, Breillat challenges the patriarchy by making a female wear the shoes of a male, and vice-versa. The gender role reversal from hell. Our protagonist is neither a monster nor a heroine. She is neither adorable nor repulsive.And she is worthy of neither our pity nor our admiration. She is just a woman who opted to put herself through the wringer in order to keep certain privileges.

.

5. Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023):

Not our editor’s favourite movie ever, yet one of the biggest summer hits in the UK and elsewhere. In summer 2006, Oxford students shun the awkward and shy University of Oxford student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) because of his perceived lack of upper-class credentials and manners. Popular student and heartthrob Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) is moved by the underdog, particularly after learning about his father’s history of drug abuse, and his broken upbringing. So he takes the apparently vulnerable boy under his wing, thus devoting his full care and attention. That raises a few eyebrows, with a fellow student warning Felix: “he buys his clothes from Oxfam”. But Felix is determined to make Oliver feel at home. He invites him to his family’s country house, called Saltburn, where he becomes fully immersed in the lavish, exotic, topsy-turvy world of the British upper class.

This is a technically accomplished movie, with the finest top-drawer performances, impeccable production design and elegant cinematography, on a par with the British ostentatiousness it sets out to portray. The imagery is plush, the frame ratio is unusually near-square, providing the film with a distinctive cinema experience, a bizarre fantasy drama where the monsters are the lewd and manipulative human beings.

.

6. Summer 1993 (Carla Simon, 2018):

HIV first appeared in Spain in 1981. The virus – primarily spread by needle-sharing among drug users in the nascent democracy – peaked in 1997, when there were around 120,000 diagnoses of HIV/AIDS in the adult population. Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón was born in 1986 and is one of many orphans whose parents died from HIV when she was a child. Her debut feature film Summer 1993 is a biographical piece directly inspired by her experiences as a newly-motherless six-year-old girl during a balmy summer in 1990s Catalonia.

Summer 1993 burns slowly across the screen, subtly peeling back the complex and conflicting layers of grief in all their human totality. It never shies away from the more difficult manifestations of family bereavement – the selfishness and spitefulness that can emerge as a way of coping with the sheer injustice of having your life-giver and protector torn away. It lays out an honestly brutal array of emotions, without any place for sentimentality or idealistic happy-endings.

.

7. Summer 85 (Francois Ozon, 2020):

Meeting the right person at the right time can cause both parties to flower and grow. Enter 16 year old Alexis Robin (Félix Lefebvre), beginning his school holidays on the pebbled shores of Calais. Affable but perhaps a little reserved, he is at a crossroads between continuing education or finding his place in the world of work. Over the course of a single day, Alexis is catapulted into an intense friendship with self-possessed David Gorman (Benjamin Voisin). With a couple of years seniority, David captivates Alexis with lingering eye contact and physical interaction that hints at something more. The pair exhibit more electrochemistry than a 12-volt car battery and romance quickly follows. Both are transformed by their encounter, with Alexis blossoming with newfound confidence at their union and David finding succour following the recent passing of his father.

However, even in the midst of a perfect summer, the spectre of autumn looms to threaten the leaves of new growth. Imminent tragedy is explicitly telegraphed from the get-go and the film jumps between the bright summer days and a grey, washed-out future. Too often films are ruined by divulging their coming flashpoints ahead of time but Summer 85 manages to circumvent this issue; alternating timelines are used to great narrative effect. Easy and free with their public displays of affection, the potential difficulties of being gay in the 1980s are dropped in favour of showing the sincere moments of unbridled joy at the centre of their relationship. This honest beauty is enough to quell any sense of foreboding and gradually enables the audience to understand just why the principals become so very distraught. The sweet innocence of their young love is further maintained by their various acts of consummation kept private and offscreen.

Summer 85 is also pictured at the top of this article.

.

8. Summer Brother (Joren Molter, 2024):

Aged 13, but with the scrawny body and looks of a 10-year-old, Brian (Jarne Heylen) lives in a chaotic trailer encampment with his happy-go-lucky and impetuous father Maurice (Jarne Heylen) somewhere in the Netherlands. The man looks rough, with a thick beard and tattooed body, however he occasionally demonstrates affection and care. The problem is that dad’s just too busy doing nothing, thereby leaving his younger son to look after his elder Julien (Joël in ‘t Veld). Money is rare occurrence and a significant issue, in this deeply impoverished environment one hardly associates with one of the most developed nations of Europe.

Julien is a few years older than Brian, his body the size of an adult. He screams and wails like a six-month-old baby, his digits, his limbs and his neck vaguely contorted. He probably has cerebral palsy or very advanced autism (the precise condition is never revealed). Julien normally lives in a specialised institution. At first it’s unclear why Maurice removed him from a life of relative comfort and safety, with the right medication and doctors to hand, and placed him in an environment not too different from a war zone for the summer. It’s only in one of the final scenes that Brian realises the real reason behind his father’s apparent altruism: a large financial incentive. But even that money isn’t enough to pay off his debts, and eviction remains a looming possibility. Brian asks the obvious question: where could they move? It’s unclear how much lower one could possibly go in a developed society with a robust welfare state. Based on the award-winning, eponymous novel by Jaap Robben, Summer Brother is a very honest endeavour. The images possess the brutal and yet touching intimacy of American photographer Nan Goldin, and the acting is very naturalistic. The authenticity is such that it may cause discomfort

.

9. Summerland (Jessica Swale, 2020):

If there is one bright spot to be had for movie lovers, it’s that smaller independent stories are getting the chance for a bigger platform, having an increased presence as cinemas open up with precious little new content to exhibit. One title is Summerland, a low-budget British drama worth seeking out. Gemma Arterton stars as Alice, an abrasive writer living alone in a coastal town during World War 2. She is surprised to learn that she is the guardian of an evacuee from London named Frank (Lucas Bond). While Alice initially rejects the new arrival, the pair grow close and force her to confront the pain of her past.

The premise is nothing new: a young evacuee stays with a loner who protests at the predicament, only for the two to form a bond. It’s the stuff of numerous tea-time TV dramas, but beneath the surface is something richer. It is in the subplots and character development that this story begins to soar. Director Jessica Swale’s script crafts a broad and interesting arc for Alice. Arterton’s portrayal of the character begins as almost spiteful, confronting the local headmaster and playing a cruel trick on a child in a sweet shop. However, the film slowly reveals why she is angry and the world, and begins to plant the seeds of change. Alice and Frank warm to each other in a very natural way, finding a common interest in Alice’s study of mythology, particularly the idea of Summerland, a coastal mirage believed to have been a vision of the afterlife.

.

10. Sunburn (Vicente Alves do Ó, 2019):

Francisco (Nuno Pardal), Simão (Ricardo Barbosa), Vasco (Ricardo Pereira) and Joana (Oceana Basilio) are virtually cut off from the rest of the world in a large and extravagant villa somewhere in Portugal. It’s a sweltering summer, and they spend most of of their time in the swimming pool, strutting around in skimpy bathing suits, rehearsing selfies in front of the mirror or dancing to Brazilian songs. It sounds like most people’s idea of paradise. But it’s not.

Behind the apparent idyllic setting there’s a lot of tension. Sexual tension, emotional tension. Not all is pretty and clean. This is a place for “gin, sun, pool and flies”, says one of the friends, thereby highlighting the duality of the sumptuous summer abode. The distant sound of sirens and helicopters is pervasive throughout the film. Such luxury and isolation are strangely suffocating, and never liberating. Ultimately, Sunburn is a mockery of failed modern love, and people tragically trapped in conservative dreams of marriage.