Crank up the window fans and pop the popcorn! Our August movie selections feature films that make the dog days of summer look anything but sluggish. Whether the action is on the neighborhood stoops of Brooklyn or a freewheeling road trip to the Mexican border, heavy summertime heat has a magical way of distilling human impulses for the big screen. Check out our classic and contemporary staff favorites for your next home movie night.
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Adventureland
Recent college graduate, James, unable to afford his planned trip to Europe, finds himself working at a run-down amusement park for the summer where he meets and begins a relationship with Emily. A clever coming of age comedy pumped full of late 1980s music. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader and Margarita Levieva. |
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Rear window /
In this 1954 Hitchock classic starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly, a photographer with a broken leg watches his neighbors through the window and suspects that his neighbor has murdered his invalid wife during an intense heat wave. |
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Do the right thing Director Spike Lee's 1989 comedy drama takes place on the hottest day of the year in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. Racial tensions are quickly inflamed and violence ensues when a neighborhood local becomes upset when he sees that the local pizzaria (owned by an Italian) does not showcase black actors on it's Wall of Fame despite being in black neighborhood. |
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Moonrise kingdom /
This coming of age comedy/drama by filmmaker Wes Anderson is set in the 1960s New England over a few summer weeks. Two twelve-year-olds from a small town fall in love and run away together and a search party forms to look for them. Feeling alienated from their guardians and shunned by their peers, the two set up camp in an isolated beach cove. |
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Thelma & Louise
A waitress and a housewife try to get away from their boyfriend and husband for a weekend but instead end up on a crosscountry crime spree through the South |
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Days of the Bagnold summer /
A coming of age movie with gentle humor and tender insigh. A single mother faces the prospects of spending six weeks of summer vacation with her rebellious teenage son when her former husband suddenly cancels their previous arrangement of having him over at his house in Florida. The film was based on the 2012 graphic novel of the same name by Joff Winterhart, adapted for the screen by Lisa Owens. |
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Insomnia
When Detective Will Dormer goes to Alaska to solve a brutal murder, his inability to adjust to constant daylight during the summer months leads him to start questioning his own mind while trying to catch the killer. Al Pacino and Robin Williams star in this psychological drama. |
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Summer of 85
Two teenage boys living on the coast of Normandy have a summer romance that changes their lives forever. beguiling, bittersweet ode to teen love and its lingering after-effects |
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Summer story / written by Penelope Mortimer; directed by Piers Haggard
A young girl in the English countryside falls in love with a lawyer from London after he twists his ankle hiking and spends time resting at her family's farmhouse. directed by Piers Haggard, based on John Galsworthy’s 1916 short story "The Apple Tree", with a script by Penelope Mortimer. It stars James Wilby, Imogen Stubbs, and Susannah York. |
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Y tu mamá también Set in 1999, Julio and Tenoch are teenage boys whose friendship is tested when they befriend a seductive twenty-eight year old named Luisa on a road trip. |
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Myth of the American sleepover [videorecording] / produced by Adele Romanski; written and directed by David Robert Mitchell
In the tradition of free-wheeling tributes to adolescence like DAZED & CONFUSED, this film follows four teenagers in search of love and adventure on the last night of their summer vacation "The Myth of the American Sleepover authentically evokes adolescence -- and all of the awkwardness and heartbreak that comes with it." |
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Call me by your name
Chronicles the summertime romantic relationship between a 17-year-old, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), and Oliver (Armie Hammer), a 24-year-old graduate-student assistant to Elio's father Samuel (Michael Stuhlbarg), an archaeology professor. |
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Hotel Transylvania 3
When Drac takes his family on a vacation on a luxury monster cruise ship, he falls for the captain, Ericka, who hides a secret that could destroy them all. |
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Sisterhood of the traveling pants
Four lifelong friends, facing their first summer apart, use a pair of jeans as a way of keeping in touch; each wearing the jeans for a week to see what luck comes their way before passing them on to the next. |
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Dog day afternoon
This 1975 American crime drama is based on a true story of a "simple" late summer afternoon bank robbery in New York that turned into a media event, with insights into the complex characters of the robbers. From director Sidney Lumet and fueled by a gripping performance from Al Pacino, Dog Day Afternoon offers a finely detailed snapshot of people in crisis with tension-soaked drama shaded in black humor. |
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Streetcar named Desire [videorecording] / Warner Bros; produced by Charles K. Feldman; directed by Elia Kazan; screenplay by Tennessee Williams
Starring Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh, this steamy New Orleans Southen Gothic adaptation of Williams' play by the same name takes place in the summer of 1947. The plot follows the emotional disintegration of a Southern woman whose last chance for happiness is destroyed by her vindictive brother-in-law. |
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Dirty dancing /
An innocent young girl is introduced to the sensuality of dance when she meets the dance instructor at her summer resort hotel. Dirty Dancing uses impressive choreography and the power of song to surmount a series of formidable obstacles. |
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In the heat of the night
A black Philadelphia homicide detective reluctantly assists a white sheriff in solving a murder in 1960s Mississippi. Tense, funny, and thought-provoking all at once, and lifted by strong performances from Sydney Poitier and Rod Steiger, director Norman Jewison's look at murder and racism in small-town America continues to resonate today. |
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In the Heights
Taking place on the hottest day of the summer, this music and dance film follows the lives, dreams, and aspirations of various people living in the Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, New York. Starring Jimmy Smits, Lin Manuel Miranda, Leslie Grace and others. Based on the stage musical of the same name. |
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American graffiti /
A coming of age film starring Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard in the rock and roll cruising culture of Modesto California in the early 1960s. On the last night of summer vacation,high school graduates Curt Henderson and Steve Bolander meet up with two other friends on the eve or college, military service and the end of their innocence. |
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Holes
In this 2003 family comedy, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a detention camp after being falsely accused of a crime, and told by the warden to dig holes in the desert in search of a mysterious buried treasure. Starring Sigourney Weaver and Jon Voight. |
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Summer hours
On a summer day in the country, at the home of the widowed Hélène Berthier, her three children, their spouses, and all her grandchildren assemble for her 75th birthday. Her preoccupation is over what will happen to the house and its valuable contents . She hopes the children will decide amicably among themselves. Shortly after she dies, and the three heirs do not agree. Starring Juliette Binoche. |
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Body heat
In the heat of a relentless summer, Ned Racine, an inept South Florida lawyer, meets and begins an affair with Matty Walker. Walker, played by Kathleen Turner convinces her lover played by William Hurt to kill her rich husband so they can flee to a tropical paradise and live on the fortune, but her plan has an added twist |