The Best Summer Vacation Movies: ‘Parent Trap,’ ‘Aftersun,’ ‘Two for the Road,’ and More

To quote Alice Cooper (and poorly paraphrase “High School Musical 2”), school’s out for summer. With Boppenheimer hitting air-conditioned theaters midway through July — just as countless actors and screenwriters head into the heat to join picket-lines in New York and Los Angeles — summer 2023 will no doubt prove a memorable one for Hollywood. What better time then to consider how the movies themselves represent the reason for the season?

The best summer vacation movies range in subject matter and can appeal to all sorts of different audiences. Kid-centric flicks, like “The Parent Trap,” and adult slashers, like the “Friday the 13th” films, explore the traditions and perils of sleep-away camp from spectacularly different view points. Meanwhile, road trip flicks, like the Audrey Hepburn-starring “Two for the Road” and Hindi film “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara,” consider the ins-and-outs of traveling across the country with a similar romanticism but using tones separated by decades and cultures. Destination films, including “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” (which see their characters head to Italy and Hawaii respectively), celebrate the innate entertainment in stepping off a plane and emerging into somewhere new.

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When curating the top films in this surprisingly robust category, we did our best to restrict ourselves to movies that explicitly take place during the summer months — or, at least very least, exist in weather nondescriptly pleasant enough that we could sufficiently lie to ourselves about when they occur. A break from school or work can be part of a title’s plot points, but doesn’t strictly have. To wit, summer vacation plays a critical narrative plot in “Grease” but wasn’t a fit with the rest of our list. (“Grease” is to summer vacation movies what “Reservoir Dogs” is to heist movies, you know?)

Listed in chronological order, the following represent the best summer vacation movies, including “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Under the Sand,” “Adventureland,” “Summertime,” “Aftersun,” and more.

With editorial contributions by Wilson Chapman, Kate Erbland, Marcos Franco, Proma Khosla, and Mark Peikert.

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