What movie feels like summer to you?

Heat radiating off the sidewalk, water lapping at the shore, charged emotions—and sometimes sharks

By Jen Lennon, Saloni Gajjar, Drew Gillis, Tim Lowery, Emma Keates, Cindy White, Jacob Oller, Mary Kate Carr | May 10, 2024 | 2:00pm

Film Features Films

Clockwise from bottom left: Before Sunrise (Columbia Pictures), Jaws (Universal Pictures), Y Tu Mamá También (20th Century Fox), Body Heat (Warner Bros.) Graphic: The A.V. Club

Summer can bring about more than just a certain mood evoked by warmer weather. Perhaps more than other seasons, it can bring up specific memories. For some, summer feels like adolescence, mountain bikes, chalk on the driveway, and trying to stave off the boredom after you’ve been ordered outside for the day. For others, it’s all warm beaches and romance, the welcoming glow of the sun. And sometimes it’s the miserable, sweltering heat beating down on you, inescapable, at a time when you just can’t catch a break. Since the season can bring up so many different emotions, we decided to ask our staff: What movie feels like summer to you?

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Y Tu Mama Tambien Official Trailer #1 - Gael GarcÍa Bernal Movie (2001) HD

When I was a teen, I never went on a road trip like the two best friends (played with perfect bratty bravado by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna) at the center of Alfonso Cuarón’s sun-kissed, sex-driven masterpiece Y Tu Mamá También. But there is something in this tale of the duo taking—or is it tricking?—a gorgeous older woman (Maribel Verdú’s Luisa) to a beach that doesn’t exist (a brilliant metaphor if there ever was one) that hits home, namely in how beautifully stupid, freewheeling, happy, annoying, and cocky the pair is. Life, as we see in the film’s ending, would indeed suck that spirit out of them. : “That summer feeling will come to haunt you one day in your life.” [Tim Lowery]

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