Editor’s note: this list was originally published in July 2023. It has since been updated with new entries. 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. When curating the top films in this surprisingly robust category, we did our best to restrict ourselves.
