Morocco (1930) A Legionnaire (Gary Cooper) dallies with a world-weary desert-oasis diva (Marlene Dietrich), who isn’t exactly as cynical and experience-toughened as she thought. The first, epochal American Marlene Dietrich-Josef von Sternberg film is the muggiest, woozy with hot, moonlit Saharan nighttime. Of course it was all done on the Paramount lot, with shadows – according to von Sternberg’s uproariously self-aggrandizing memoir, the Pasha of Marrakech asked him years later why the filmmaker had not visited him when making the film in Morocco, which he’d recognized first-hand. Von Sternberg maintained he’d never been to the country, and Cooper, in his forward to the book, doubts the windy director could’ve found the nation on a map.

Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et La Bete) (1946) Jean Cocteau’s definitive incarnation of the fairy tale, and a supremely dreamy July daydream, shot with silvery shimmering by Henry Alekan, and infused with nursery wonder. Jean Marais’s leonine Beast is fab, but Josette Day’s serene maiden is close to an ideal.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) Ingmar Bergman, summery? This famous art-house favorite isn’t the Swedish moper’s only comedy, but it is his funniest, largely restricted to intertwining boudoir farce reminiscent of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and reinvented decades later as Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music), but occasionally embracing love in a haystack at dusk.

The Blob (1958) An alien jelly-mold has invaded Eisenhower-era, drive-in-crazy Middle America, and only honest teen Steve McQueen (who was actually 28) can save us. There’s something quintessential here, a potent feel for small towns at night when everyone’s home looking toward bed except the pesky teenagers – those kids! – and the amused, lazy cops manning the local station.

Black Orpheus (1959) The most evocative tropical film ever made, this peacock of a movie transposes the Orpheus-Eurydice myth to Rio amid Carnivale, and the heavy dose of South American colors, non-stop samba music, sweat, dancing, copulating and Brazilian zest can make you dizzy. The tale is tragic, of course, but one-hit-wonder director Marcel Camus determinedly turns on the juice, and in the end it’s spectacularly life-affirming.

Planet of the Apes (1968) Before there was "the summer blockbuster" (a label on movies now that describes their box-office intentions, not their actual success), there was the matinee movie, meant as a respite from summer heat for pre-video kids with nothing to watch at home and brainpans overflowing with Marvel comics, Aurora models and backyard G.I. Joe scenarios. This beautiful, conceptually fearless piece of all-American pulp – forget the Tim Burton remake – remains resonant and unforgettable, but also invokes an entire decade of summers (what with its frequent sequels and re-releases) for a lucky generation of kids, whose cerebellums are permanently branded with the image of Charlton Heston kneeling on the beach, before the wrecked Statue of Liberty. Ah, to be lost on this desert planet once more...

Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) Director Sergio Leone virtually invented the Italian-made "spaghetti western," and this hot, sweaty mastodon of a movie may be its crowning exemplar: it's the most overwrought, supercool, breathtakingly lavish, preposterously lyrical western ever made. The sets are huge (farmhouses appear to have 12 or more rooms), the story absurd, the music rapturous, the faux-desert sun hot. Every aspect of it is swooning with the love for Movies – every scene is a western standard jacked up into a feverish fit. The incredible opening credits sequence alone (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, a fly, a deserted train station...) is worth the rental fee, and, like the rest of this super-widescreen mock-opera, must have given the video transfer guys serious headaches. The story involves the westward push of the railroad, a mail-order bride (Claudia Cardinale), a rogue outlaw (Jason Robards), a mysterious man-with-no-name bent on avenging his father's murder (Charles Bronson), and Henry Fonda marvelously countercast as the vilest western villain of all time. As exaggerated and berserk and self-conscious as it is, it's also profoundly sad – Ennio Morricone's crescendoing music makes the loss of the Old West seem a heartrending reality.

The Other (1972) Thomas Tryon’s corn-belt-Gothic thriller about a well-off country family in the ‘30s plagued by twin sons (the remarkable Chris and Martin Udvarnoky), one of whom is dead (and a ghost?) and the other of whom may be crazy. A helluva yarn with a nasty taste for Grand Guignol, it’s also an intensely humid film (thanks to director Robert Mulligan), exploring the kid spaces on a summer-scorched farm, before there were Gameboys and day camps.

Chinatown (1974) The film that first reincarnated the detective-film noir, Roman Polanski’s majesterial movie is all about L.A., so it’s not shadowy and expressionistic – it’s blistered by July sunshine, and no less affecting for the turnabout. One of the unarguable gems in the American canon, this film can and should be seen for a variety of reasons, but the glare-&-heat seasonal mood is impressive, particularly in view of how the hero – Jack Nicholson’s supercool private dick Jake Gittes – rather hedonistically spends his sweltering mid-days: hanging out, avoiding authority, kinda like a kid.

Jaws (1975) If you were there, in the theaters in the summer of ‘75, you’ve got this movie in your DNA. Truly communal movie experiences like it haven’t come by since – everyone saw it, twice, and everyone had a new relationship with the beach. But put the man-eating giant monster shark aside for a moment, and you’ve got full-on, real-to-the-touch Atlantic beach community life, back when people listened to transistor radios in the sand and used suntan oil. The actors’ clothes even seem creased with sand and salt air.

Phantasm (1978) Perhaps the only effective summertime horror film, Dan Coscarelli’s hallucinogenic original deals with a mysterious mortuary with profoundly weird things going on deep inside of it, but investigated by a lonely kid (Michael Baldwin) in the dead of deeply shadowed, suburban July nighttimes. This is what we imagined all of that staying-out-late during summer vacation might’ve amounted to.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) It’s possible that no American movie has been as besotted with the sensual realities of summertime as this overlooked and in fact infinitely repeatable Woody Allen comedy, in which three early-century couples gather in a to-die-for Victorian house in the country for a balmy weekend, and endure various mate-swapping peccadilloes. Light on its feet, soundtracked by Felix Mendelssohn, and blessed with the effervescence of Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty, Allen’s movie goes for broke in terms of seasonal glamour: sunlit meadows, firefly swarms, moonlit brooks, rendezvous in the night forest, dining al fresco, daydreaming in cotton dresses, suspenders and straw hats, all of it shot with Vermeerian sublimity by Gordon Willis. It’s time this honey got a reappraisal.

Stand By Me (1985) The search for the dead body in the woods in this Stephen King-derived hit is merely a MacGuffin – the four tweens (Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell) could’ve been hunting for mushrooms. What’s really at stake here is the recreation of early-‘60s childhood summers, before parents began micromanaging their kids’ lives. Once, when summer was summer, not just an excuse for air-conditioning, you could roam into the next county, along the train tracks, through the leechy swamps, into treehouses, and across mad-dog-guarded junkyards, and nobody thought twice about it.

Summer (1986) Or, as Eric Rohmer originally titled it, "Le Rayon vert," referring to the Jules Vernian green ray that a setting sun is supposed to create at the instant of disappearance – Rohmer’s heroine here (Marie Riviere) is a secretary suddenly alone on vacation, trying different places and strategies, but maddeningly unable to enjoy herself or find fulfillment. Given such a structure, the movie can be frustrating, too, but only if you make the mistake of needing Riviere’s nowhere girl to do what you would do. At the same time, it’s a potent character portrait, a philosophical parable, and a tour of French summer choices, from Cherbourg to the Alps to the beach at Biarritz.

Point Break (1990) One of the few genuine camp romps of the Reagan-Bush era, this goofball, directed in high, silly style by Kathryn Bigelow, has studly fed Keanu Reeves infiltrate Patrick Swayze’s clan of extreme-sports, surfin’-bird, parachutin’ bank robbers. Idiotic and faux-philosophical, it exudes a thrill-seeking vibe that’s hard to skip, especially when it’s apparent that the stars actually jumped out of airplanes.

Belle Epoque (1993) This Spanish hit has a timeworn vacation-movie story – a well-intentioned boob (Gabino Diego) deserting during the Civil War in the ‘30s takes shelter with a family made up of one crotchety old man (Fernando Fernan Gomez) and his four tempestuous daughters (among them, Penelope Cruz and Y Tu Mama Tambien’s Maribel Verdu), all of whom seem in need of a good schtupping. But even though it’s set off-season, it’s still Spain, and it’s got the vibe: Mediterranean heat-beaten stone buildings, Spanish palm trees, beautiful women in sleeveless blouses wandering around thinking about sex even when they don’t think they’re thinking about it. Nothing too artful, but lovely.