The 10 most sizzling summer romances on screen

As the heat rises during the summer months, so does the emotional temperature. Many famous filmmakers have captured that by depicting passionate love affairs during the season.

Most of us know what summer love is like. Perhaps we know it from life experience as much as from movies that deal with the subject. The boredom of adolescent summer holidays, the frustration of the heat, the opportunity to meet at the beach, the park, the pool or a foreign location that throws everyone out of their usual rhythm. There’s something about the hot, blue summer skies that propels people into romantic fantasies and amorous thoughts, and movies have long sought to portray that, usually very brief, excitement. From Eric Rohmer to Spike Lee to Luca Guadagnino, filmmakers have portrayed the fleeting, sexy, and steamy summer romance. Here are 10 of the best.

Terrence Malick’s languid summer romance goes horribly awry, into a near-motiveless homicidal mania. A sociopathic but charming young man, Kit (Martin Sheen, a James Dean impersonator), and a younger, wide-eyed teenager (Sissy Spacek, hauntingly poetic in her narration), hit the road and start killing for little reason, not even any particular animosity. Based on the shocking real-life serial murders of a teenage couple in 1950s America, Malick uses the trope of lovers on the run, like in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), to craft a less rapturous, more disturbing vision of young love as a pathology. Badlands showcased Malick’s immense cinematic talent and the sinister side of the Midwestern soul.

It’s a fairly conventional story, a formative summer fling and a powerful coming-of-age tale at the same time. But Guadagnino hits all the right notes here: a hallowed academic backdrop set in a hot summer of 1980s Italian hedonism, a blend of the classical and the secular, and a gay romance at its heart. There’s a thrilling connection between the beautiful teenage Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his father, hunky American archaeology apprentice Oliver (Armie Hammer), and the intellectual conversations and slow build-up to physical intimacy are surprisingly well-executed. It’s no surprise that the film is now considered a queer cinema landmark. It also features a truly compelling performance from Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio’s tender father. There’s something deeply moving about loving parents supporting their child’s choices while knowing they can’t protect their son from his first heartbreak.

When it comes to holiday romance, Gregory Peck’s love affair comes first. Playing a reporter sent to pry into the life of the glamorous Audrey Hepburn, a spoiled Continental princess, Peck instead takes her on an unauthorized adventure around Rome. Not only was it Hepburn’s big breakthrough, but the film was also shot on location, taking advantage of the Eternal City’s most picturesque locations, from the Spanish Steps to the Roman Forum. Hepburn is captivating as a woman who longs to let her hair down and escape her gilded cage. Wyler, the master storyteller of Hollywood’s Golden Age, delivers a perfect balance of whimsy and melancholy, and their inevitable separation remains one of the most memorable in the history of romance.

In one of the great feminist films of the 1980s, a shy, bookish Jewish teenage girl (Jennifer Grey) goes to a rural summer camp where she meets someone who will teach her how to dance and love. Of course, that person is none other than Patrick Swayze, a popular man with deep sensitivity and tough-guy swagger. The two help a young female performer at the camp who is “in trouble” (i.e. pregnant), and arrange an illegal abortion, but when it goes awry, Baby turns to her father, a doctor, for help. While the film is a light-hearted romance classic, its frank portrayal of what was still taboo at the time is a quiet revolution. Despite the film’s layered iconography, its entrancing 1960s soundtrack, and of course, that ending, the film has the courage and emotional intelligence to transcend fantasy. It’s clearly an overwhelming feeling to see an awkward teenage girl facing off against a confident, sexy older man. Dirty Dancing transforms it into pure cinematic gold.

Few films truly evoke the heat and sweat of summer as this Florida neo-noir, a carnal exploration of desire and its dangers. It’s a truly astonishing feat of first-time directorial filmmaking, and the acting is even better. Kasdan entangles William Hurt, a scruffy, mustachioed lawyer and womanizer, in an affair with Kathleen Turner, a prim and proper, white-clad married woman who was relatively unknown at the time, despite being cast with the husky voice of Lauren Bacall. In old-school style, a murderous plot unfolds. What else could they do but kill her husband? Things get complicated by the machinations of Turner’s cunning femme fatale. But above all, Body Heat gives the sense that hot weather drives everyone crazy — addicted to violence and sex — and that this is the result.

A quintessential summer movie, La Piscine delves into the dark hearts of forbidden desires and intense jealousies of four people vacationing on the French Riviera. In Deray’s film, an impossibly beautiful couple — a sun-kissed, sensual Alain Delon as Jean-Paul and his ex-wife Romy Schneider as Marianne — are unexpectedly joined in their luxurious villa by Marianne’s ex-lover Maurice Ronet and 18-year-old newcomer Jane Birkin, who plays their daughter. In this classic of French passion and suspense, erotic fantasies both old and new, and a positive cat’s cradle of exchanged glances and tanned paws, lead to violence. Naturally, someone ends up dead.

Anyone who’s ever worked a minimum-wage summer job, especially one that involves tourists and kids, will understand the woes of James, an arcade employee played by a deadpan and perpetually frustrated Jesse Eisenberg. Bored, restless, and perpetually horny, James is infatuated with fellow employee Em (Kristen Stewart, to boot). But Em is busy with another man, and Adventureland soon becomes both the daily woes of a man who feels stuck and his quest to win her over. A funny yet melancholic portrayal of the fragility of summer work, its frustrations and woes, Adventureland ends with a surprisingly moving conclusion. It’s an ode to the aimlessness of youth, at an age when it’s still acceptable to be directionless, and even to blast an indie rock soundtrack to romanticize it.

If you watch a Merchant Ivory film for the romance, it’s for the yearning and unspoken desires of the Edwardian people, not the hedonistic sex and sunburn sensations of most other summer romances. Still, it’s very titillating to see a repressed, polite Englishman having rude thoughts. That’s what happens when a headstrong but polite young woman, Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter, just 19 at the time), meets the eccentric, unconventional and strikingly handsome George Emerson (Julian Sands). They’re on holiday in Italy, which is generally regarded as a hotheaded country compared to their native England, so what starts in Italy stays in Italy, and the two are separated for most of the film. Based on the 1908 novel of the same name by E.M. Forster, A Room with a View takes a surprisingly long time for the would-be lovers to be alone together. Various characters, most notably Lucy’s chaperone, cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith), try desperately to keep the two from being alone together – after all, the summer love that leads to more love was a familiar theme even to Edwardians.

This Mexican road movie love triangle is unmatched for its style, humor and sheer sexiness. When two uncontrollably horny teenagers, played by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, chance encounter a beautiful older woman (Maribel Verdú) at a party, they wish her luck and invite her on a hedonistic road trip to the beach. Little do they know that she is on the verge of divorcing her cheating husband and will actually agree. As they compete for her attention throughout the trip, she teases and plays with both of them. As she inexorably draws both men towards her, they fight, flirt and have a major sexual revelation as a result of their encounter. Aside from a perfectly orchestrated drunken dance scene that culminates in a threesome, the film is a throwing cold water on conventional mores with its progressive attitude toward open sexual activity and its cynicism about its repression.

In this reckless outlaw film with an almost Dadaist quality, bourgeois Ferdinand (French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo) abandons his marriage for his babysitter Marianne (the most seductive Anna Karina). A master of the French New Wave and arguably at the peak of his talent during his most celebrated cinematic period, Godard challenges the traditional chronology of the romantic adventure story with his explosion of primary colors and liberal use of jump cuts. He moves back and forth in time between the couple’s happy solitary journey and their various quarrels, with an enigmatic voice-over throughout. Marianne, a female type of noir film, constantly half-abandons her lover and uses the wrong name, ultimately leading to his downfall, but it’s less a story than a series of deliberate false starts to stories featuring criminal acts, the Vietnam War, and even a few musical sequences.