Before Sunrise Named Best Summer Holiday Movie
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Before Sunrise (1995), Richard Linklater's Vienna romance starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as two Interrailers who spend a night together, is ranked #1 and called a "mid-90s masterpiece" that sparked two sequels.
- Aftersun (2022), Charlotte Wells's debut feature starring Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as father and daughter on a 1999 Turkey holiday, ranks #2 and is described as "a devastating tour de force."
- The Green Ray (1986), Eric Rohmer's improvised film starring Marie Rivière as Delphine drifting across France after a breakup, lands at #3 and is called "a small miracle about a small miracle."
- Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), Satyajit Ray's film about four Kolkata bachelors driving into the Bihar backwoods, is #4 and praised as a mythic take on the buddy hangout comedy.
- Summer with Monika (1953), Ingmar Bergman's working-class Stockholm romance with Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg fleeing to the archipelago, ranks #5 and is called his most "purely relatable" work.
- Sundown (2021), Michel Franco's film in which Tim Roth fakes a lost passport to avoid returning for his mother's funeral and stays at a Mexican beach resort, ranks #9 and is dubbed the "finest existential antihero" on the list.
- The writer notes the best summer holiday films are ultimately "about time itself" — how we choose to use it — with several entries (Sundown, The Lost Daughter, The Go-Between) using sunny settings to explore grief, class tension, and identity.
Why it matters: The ranking elevates European art-house films — Rohmer, Tati, Bergman, Sciamma, Pawlikowski, and Ray — above typical American summer-movie canon, and surfaces lesser-circulated picks like 'Days and Nights in the Forest' alongside classics like 'Roman Holiday,' reshaping what counts as essential summer cinema.
Ask SkimNews
