Dirty Dancing to Y Tu Mamá También: The 10 most sizzling summer romances on screen (2024)

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As the heat rises during the summer months, so too can the emotional temperature – something many celebrated film-makers have captured with their depictions of intense seasonal flings.

Most of us know what it is to have a summer fling; probably as much from life experience as any motion picture about the subject. There's the listless feeling of adolescent summer holiday boredom; the irritation of the heat; the chance to meet at beaches, parks, pools, or in foreign spots where everyone is thrown out of their usual rhythms. There's just something about the blue skies of a hot summer that can drive people to romantic fantasy and lustful thinking, and cinema has long chased the depiction of that usually all-too-brief excitement. Ephemeral and sexy, hot summer romances have been depicted by film-makers from Eric Rohmer to Spike Lee to Luca Guadagnino. Here are 10 of the very best.

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1. Badlands (1973) dir Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick's languorous summer romance is one that goes chillingly awry – that is to say, on a largely unmotivated killing spree. A sociopathic but charming young man, Kit (Martin Sheen, aping James Dean) and a younger, wide-eye teen, (an unforgettable Sissy Spacek, with a drawling, poetic voiceover) hit the road and begin to kill, with very little reason or even particular animus. Based on a real series of shocking murders by a teen couple in 1950s America, Malick uses the lovers-on-the-run trope of films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to create a less frenetic and more disturbing vision of young love as a pathology. Badlands announced the immense talent of Malick on to the film scene, and a malevolent streak in the soul of the American Midwest.

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2. Call Me by Your Name (2017) dir Luca Guadagnino

It's a definite cliché: a formative summer fling which also serves as a powerful coming-of-age story. But Guadagnino has all the elements of this one just right: a hallowed academic background for a hot 1980s Italian summer of hedonism; the classical and the profane coalescing; the gay romance at the centre. There's the frisson between pretty teen Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his father's hunky US apprentice in archaeology, Oliver (Armie Hammer); the cerebral patter and slow burn build toward physical intimacy is remarkably well-choreographed. It's not a huge surprise that the movie now is regarded as a milestone in queer cinema. The film also features a truly show-stopping performance from Michael Stuhlbarg as Elio's kindly father; there’s something so moving about loving parents who both support their child's choices and also know they cannot protect their son from his first heartbreak.

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3. Roman Holiday (1953) dir William Wyler

There's a holiday romance, and then there's falling in love with Gregory Peck. Peck, playing a reporter sent to snoop on the life of a cosseted continental princess – the sparkling Audrey Hepburn – instead goes off with her on an unsanctioned adventure across Rome. As well as being Hepburn's big breakout role, the film was shot on location, making the most of The Eternal City's most picturesque locations, from the Spanish Steps to the Roman Forum. Hepburn is delightful as a woman desperate to let her hair down and leave her gilded cage. Wyler, a master storyteller of Hollywood's Golden Age, deploys whimsy and melancholy with perfect balance; the pair's inevitable parting of ways remains one of the most memorable in romantic history.

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4. Dirty Dancing (1987), dir Emile Ardolino

In one of the great feel-good feminist films of the 1980s, a shy, bookish Jewish teen girl (Jennifer Grey) goes to summer camp in the sticks and meets someone who teaches her to dance and to love. Of course, that person is none other than Patrick Swayze, a heartthrob of both profound sensitivity and a tough-guy swagger. The pair also help a young woman performer at the camp who’s "in trouble" (ie pregnant) and procure her an illegal abortion, which is botched, only for Baby to call on her doctor father to come to the rescue. That the film is an upbeat romantic classic but offers such a frank portrayal of a then-still-taboo act is quietly revolutionary. Even with its layers of movie iconography, its swooning 1960s soundtrack, and – naturally – that ending, the film has a grit and emotional intelligence that transcend fantasy. Being a gawky teen girl confronted with a self-assured, sexy older guy is an identifiably overwhelming emotion; Dirty Dancing turns it into pure cinema gold.

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5. Body Heat (1981) dir Lawrence Kasdan

Few films are so genuinely redolent of summer swelter and sweat than this Floridian neo-noir, a carnal exploration of desire and its dangers. It's a truly remarkable feat of film-making for a first-time director, all the more so for its performances. Kasdan deploys a sleazebag, mustachioed William Hurt – a seedy lawyer and womaniser – into an affair with the pristine, white-clad, married Kathleen Turner, cast for her husky Lauren Bacall voice but then a relative unknown. In traditional throwback style, a murder plot develops: what else is there to do but bump off her husband? Complications ensue, largely down to Turner's wily femme fatale machinations. But most of all, Body Heat gives you the sense that hot weather makes everyone crazy – crazy for violence, crazy for sex – and that these are the results.

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6. La Piscine (1969) dir Jacques Deray

One of the quintessential summer films, La Piscine delves into the dark heart of forbidden desire and hot-blooded jealousy between four people on vacation in the French Riviera. Deray's film stars a sun-kissed, sensual Alain Delon as Jean-Paul and former wife Romy Schneider as Marianne, an impossibly beautiful couple who are unexpectedly joined in their lush vacation home by Marianne's former lover, Maurice Ronet, and his daughter, played by ingénue Jane Birkin at only 18. Erotic fantasies both old and new – and a positive cat's cradle of exchanged glances and tanned limbs – lead to violence in this Gallic classic of passion and suspense. Someone winds up dead, naturally.

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7. Adventureland (2009) dir Greg Mottola

Anyone who's ever worked a minimum wage summer job – especially one involving tourists or children – will feel the anguish of arcade games worker James, played by a deadpan and forever exasperated Jesse Eisenberg. Bored, restless, and invariably horny, he finds an object of obsession in Em, fellow employee (and Kristen Stewart, to boot). Em, however, is busy with another man, and Adventureland becomes a story as much about winning her over as it does the daily hangups of a guy who feels he's going nowhere fast. A funny and melancholic view of the temporariness of summer work, its discontents and hang ups – Adventureland builds to a surprisingly poignant conclusion. It's an ode to the aimlessness of youth, at an age where you can still get away with being directionless and even stick an indie rock soundtrack on to romanticise it.

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8. A Room with a View (1985) dir James Ivory

If you're coming to a Merchant Ivory film for romance, you’re coming for the yearning and unexpressed desire of starchily dressed Edwardians, and certainly not the hedonistic sex and suntan feel of most other summer-set romance films. Still, there's something very hot about seeing repressed, polite Brits have impolite thoughts; that's what happens to stubborn but proper young woman Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham-Carter, only 19 here) when she meets the odd, nonconformist, and strikingly handsome George Emerson (Julian Sands). They're on vacation in Italy, a generally accepted hotter-blooded nation than their native England, and thus what begins in Italy stays there: the two remain apart for the majority of the film. Based on the 1908 EM Forster novel of the same name, A Room with a View takes a tantalising amount of time to allow the two would-be lovers to even be left alone together, with a variety of characters – most memorably Lucy's chaperone cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith) – doing their damndest to ensure it doesn’t happen. It turns out that a summer romance which leaves you wanting more is a familiar theme, even to the Edwardians.

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9. Y Tu Mamá También (2001) dir Alfonso Cuaron

This Mexican road movie ménage- à-trois remains unmatched in its style, humour, and flat-out sexiness. Two irrepressibly horny teenagers, played by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, happen across a gorgeous older woman (Maribel Verdú) at a party and invite her on a hedonistic road trip to the beach, hoping to get lucky. What they do not realise is that she is on the cusp of divorce from an unfaithful husband and will actually say yes. They spend the journey jockeying for her attention as she spends it teasing and playing with them both. As she draws the two men inexorably together, the pair fight, flirt, and have some major sexual epiphanies as a result of their encounter. Aside from containing a perfectly calibrated drunken dance sequence that ends in a threesome, the film is a shock of cold water in the face of conventional mores, with a progressive attitude toward open sexuality and a coolly cynical attitude about the repression of it.

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10. Pierrot Le Fou (1965) dir Jean-Luc Godard

The bourgeois Ferdinand (French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo) abandons marital life for babysitter Marianne (Anna Karina at her most beguiling) in this madcap outlaw movie with an almost Dadaist quality. Godard, the maestro of the French New Wave and here at the arguable height of his powers during his most famous period of films, works in bursts of primary colour with jump cuts galore, challenging the traditional chronology of a romantic adventure story. He moves back and forth through time between the couple's happy isolation on the road and their various quarrels, with an enigmatic voiceover throughout. Marianne, in the mould of a noir woman, is always half-abandoning and misnaming her beau, eventually leading him to his doom; but there isn't so much a plot as there is a series of knowing false-starts of plots, featuring criminal misdeeds, the Vietnam war, and even a couple of musical sequences.

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Dirty Dancing to Y Tu Mamá También: The 10 most sizzling summer romances on screen (2024)

FAQs

What was the point of y tu mamá también? ›

The film touched on many different aspects of Latino culture. The friendship between Tenoch and Julio portrayed how different and yet similar the social classes of Mexico can be and how they view each other. The relationship between Ana and the boys portrayed machismo and its effects on society.

Is there anything inappropriate in Dirty Dancing? ›

Sex, Romance & Nudity. Suggestive dancing; a teenager loses her virginity; several scenes of people in bed. A character gets pregnant and has a dangerous abortion, with complications afterward. An older married woman propositions younger men on staff at the resort and sleeps with one.

Is Dirty Dancing a feminist movie? ›

The film Dirty Dancing is one of the most progressive feminist films because the movie utilizes standard film style and technique and makes it a movie about women.

Who was the cameo in Dirty Dancing? ›

Cast. "Cousin Brucie" Morrow appears in a cameo as a magician; Morrow himself could be heard as a DJ's voice in different parts of the film. Emile Ardolino and Matthew Broderick (who was dating Grey at the time and co-starred with her in Ferris Bueller's Day Off) have cameos.

What is the meaning of "y tu mamá también"? ›

Y tu mamá también (Spanish for And Your Mother Too) is a 2001 Mexican coming-of-age road film directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who co-wrote the script with his brother Carlos.

What happens to Luisa at the end of the movie "Y tu mamá también"? ›

The ending shocks the audience with a surprising twist. It is revealed that Luisa knew she had had cancer and soon died after the guys left.

Is Dirty Dancing ok for 13 year olds? ›

Uncomfortable for me; OK for my Kid

We are a blended family with two 12-year old boys (both 12 going onto 13). I am personally uncomfortable showing them this movie because of some of the themes discussed by other parents (prostitution, abortion, sexy dancing) BUT I'M GOING TO SHOW IT TO THEM because...

Does someone get pregnant in Dirty Dancing? ›

In the film set in 1963, a decade before Roe, the character Penny played by Cynthia Rhodes has an unplanned pregnancy and must undergo an illegal abortion that results in a botched procedure and a painful recovery. Grey said of that film, “We saw someone who was hemorrhaging.

What was the mistake in Dirty Dancing? ›

Revealing mistakes

The film was set in the summer, yet the lake scene where they Johnny and Baby practice the lift was filmed in October. Since the leaves were already turning, the crew had to paint the leaves in the background. If you look closely you can see where they missed a few in one spot.

Are there 2 versions of Dirty Dancing? ›

The Dirty Dancing franchise consists of American dance-romance installments, including two theatrical films, one television series adaptation, one made-for-TV musical remake movie, five reality competition television shows, and various additional multi-media.

What happened to the female lead in Dirty Dancing? ›

In the years that followed, Grey's neck became severely compressed. She recovered emotionally after the accident and continued to act. Then, in 2001, Grey married actor and director Clark Gregg and gave birth to a daughter, Stella. But her life was marked by constant and debilitating pain.

Why is Dirty Dancing so good? ›

This film had everything dance, love and Patrick Swayze! There was so much in it and it dealt with important issues, (that were at the time, 1960's) , such as abortion. The dancing in this film was fantastic, just like the acting was! Swayze was brilliant just like Grey was too!

Which actor declined the role of Johnny in Dirty Dancing? ›

Patrick Swayze almost wasn't casted as Johnny Castle. Billy Zane and Val Kilmer were up for the role before Swayze, but Billy Zane couldn't sell it as a dancer and Val Kilmer turned down the opportunity when it was offered to him.

Who passed away from Dirty Dancing in real life? ›

Swayze died with family at his side on September 14, 2009, at the age of 57. Swayze's death occurred 20 months after his cancer diagnosis. Swayze's publicist confirmed to CNN that he had died of pancreatic cancer. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered over his New Mexico ranch.

Why did Jennifer Gray stop acting? ›

Broderick was convicted of careless driving and fined $175. Dirty Dancing was released a few weeks after the collision, catapulting Grey to fame. But she has said that her grief and survivor's guilt over the crash prevented her from enjoying the film's success and led her to withdraw from acting for some time.

What was the point of ya no estoy aqui? ›

Ulises' story is about the interconnectedness of identity and culture and finding out who you are when you're no longer here. Ulises' identity is relative to his culture, existing solely within his group of friends, his neighborhood, and the music and particular fashion of the Kolombia movement.

How old is Luisa in Y Tu Mamá También? ›

Tenoch (Luna) and Julio (Bernal) are both 17 years old and have been best mates forever. Then one day they meet Luisa (Verdú), a beautiful 28-year-old Spaniard, whom they attempt to impress, and seduce, through an invitation to come away with them to an isolated, perfect beach – that exists only in their imagination.

Where does "Y tu mamá" también take place? ›

Y Tu Mamá También | 2012

The setting is Mexico City, where Julio (Bernal) has to collect car keys from his sister at the National University, in the 1950s University City campus, south of the city. Finding the campus was taken over by a political unrest, Cuarón weaves the demo into the film.

Is Y Tu Mamá También a good movie? ›

It's a remarkable achievement to take two mostly unlikeable, raunchy teens and craft a bittersweet, moving, coming-of-age movie that has you rooting for the boys almost before you know it. Acclaimed director Alfonso Cuarón does just that with Y Tu Mamá También.

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