Holidays in real life tend to go more or less according to plan, as long as your expectations are in check: airport stress, beachside rest, a day or two of lousy weather, a mild sunburn to warm you on your way home. In the movies, however, holidays tend to be life-changing adventures, spanning dramatic personal transformation, sweeping, storybook romance or catastrophic peril. There’s a reason why screenwriters are so fond of taking their characters on a little trip: the timeframe is tightened, the stakes are raised, and as in life, people feel compelled to live a little more freely and boldly than they usually do. All that, and the film gets some pretty destination scenery into the bargain.
Take the sparring married couple played by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy: over the course of one Neapolitan tour, their relationship goes from humdrum to shattered to miraculously reconciled, buffeted by the unfamiliar moods and rhythms of holiday living. Or the whole subgenre of horror films that see young travellers meet sticky ends in such far-flung locales as Slovakia or the Australian outback – the thrill of the unfamiliar turns to the terror of the same pretty quickly.
Sometimes, it’s the most banal of holidays that can turn wildly adventurous: as a child, it was Nicolas Roeg’s wicked take on Roald Dahl’s The Witches, set on the relentlessly grey Bournemouth coastline, that taught me holidays can be both drab and terrifying.
Assembled here, in no particular order, are a few of my favourite cinematic getaways: some sparkling exercises in wish-fulfilment, others sober reminders that a few days away can’t cure deeper ailments in life or love, and a few that land somewhere in between. All leave their characters somewhere a little different from where they began, even as they begin the journey home.
Aftersun (2022, Charlotte Wells)
Charlotte Wells’s elegant, haunted debut feature at first seems a simple nostalgia piece: a woman’s reflection on a 90s girlhood holiday with her still-boyish single dad (played with piercing, Oscar-nominated emotional acuity by Paul Mescal) at a Turkish beach resort. Yet as flashes of the present day increasingly cut into past-tense growing pains, the film reveals itself as a deeper, darker study of unresolved grief and forlorn memory.
Best for: A reminder that our parents were on holiday too, with their own anxieties to escape.
The Swimming Pool (1969, Jacques Deray)
Jacques Deray’s slinky psychological thriller has weathered accusations of style over substance – but honestly, when your starting point is Alain Delon and Romy Schneider holidaying in Saint-Tropez, what’s going to trump style? Erotic psychological mind games ensue, but the imagery is at least half the point: few films have caught the interplay of sunlight, pool water and sweat-salted skin quite so tangibly.
Best for: If you want to at least feel like you’ve had a sunbathing session this washed-out summer.
Girls Trip (2017, Malcolm D Lee)
Lifestyle influencer Ryan (Regina Hall) is technically on a business trip to New Orleans, where she’s to be a keynote speaker at a cultural festival – but pleasure considerably outweighs business once she invites her three best gal-pals to join her. Cue unplanned absinthe benders, nightclub dance battles and scatological zipline mishaps, though wholesome female friendship wins the day.
Best for: Girls behaving badly, but with their hearts in the right place.
Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater)
Nearly 20 years after starry-eyed students Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) met-cute on a train to Vienna, the couple take their two daughters on a family vacation to Greece – but, in Richard Linklater’s bittersweet marital drama, they can’t quite recapture that carefree sense of continental drift.
Best for: Viewing that captures the power of a restorative drink after a stormy scene.
The Comfort of Strangers (1990, Paul Schrader)
What is it about the gilded, water-lapped beauty of Venice that lends itself so well to unseemly, or even uncanny, goings-on in the movies? Paul Schrader’s wickedly seamy Ian McEwan adaptation seems to know, but as with so many questions in this tale of a holidaying English couple taken in by Christopher Walken’s manipulative roué, isn’t quick to give answers.
Best for: Anyone trying to steer their other half toward a different Italian city this summer.
Spring Breakers (2012, Harmony Korine)
Spring break – where thousands of college students descend on beach towns for a week of unmonitored partying – remains a mostly US phenomenon. If any Brits have Fomo, Harmony Korine’s surreal descent into fluorescent criminality should relieve them of that, except for anyone who dreams of hanging with a rapping, gold-toothed James Franco.
Best for: Warm-weather debauchery sweetened by a Britney singalong.
The Green Ray (1986, Éric Rohmer)
Delphine, the restless Parisian heroine of Éric Rohmer’s gorgeous slice of summertime ennui, doesn’t have just one holiday in the course of its 98 minutes: unsure of what she wants, simultaneously lonely and desperate to be alone, she travels to Cherbourg, to the Alps, and to Biarritz before stumbling into a moment of clarity.
Best for: The fidgety, melancholic, pre-Instagram reality of a hot girl summer.
Dirty Dancing (1987, Emile Ardolino)
What needs to be said? If you still harbour daydreams of being held aloft by Patrick Swayze in a sun-rippled forest lake, absolutely nothing at all.
Best for: Summer memories so embedded in the cultural fabric, you’d swear they’re your own.
Everyone Else (2009, Maren Ade)
Seven years before her arthouse breakthrough with Toni Erdmann, German writer-director Maren Ade made this squirmingly close-to-the-bone character study of a fraying couple finally coming apart on holiday in Sardinia. Attentive to the new personas we try on for size while in an unfamiliar place, or when trying to reignite a stagnant relationship, it’s thrillingly volatile, even mercurial, film-making.
Best for: A handy rundown of who not to be while on holiday with your partner.
About Elly (2009, Asghar Farhadi)
A group of former law-school friends go on holiday to the Caspian Sea, where shy, hesitant Elly is matchmade with a fellow singleton. When she unaccountably disappears, however, all manner of secrets and subterfuge are brought to the surface – as Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi expertly probes the intricacies of his country’s class politics and gender roles through one haunting domestic mystery.
Best for: A holiday film with some social baggage to unpack.
Archipelago (2010, Joanna Hogg)
Made before “staycation” oddly became a term for any holiday within Britain, Joanna Hogg’s precise, crisply funny portrait of a well-to-do adult family venting their differences on the Isles of Scilly is steered by intricate, merciless observations of upper-class politics – but its atmosphere is defined by the relentlessly oppressive weather of it all.
Best for: One of Britain’s quintessential evocations of the rainy-day blues.
Force Majeure (2014, Ruben Östlund)
As a child on holiday, your dad’s protective instinct is generally something you wish he’d curb – but Ruben Östlund’s savage black-comic takedown of fragile masculinity offers an exception to this rule. While on a ski trip, a Swedish father abandons his family in the face of an apparent avalanche; the fallout from this regrettable impulse is rather more of a disaster.
Best for: A wintry slap of social awkwardness in a genre dominated by summer holidays.
Two for the Road (1967, Stanley Donen)
A sophisticated married couple – played by the never-more-chic Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney – take a fractious, frosty road trip from Kent to the French Riviera, as the timeline of Stanley Donen’s witty, sexy-sad film lithely darts across the four previous trips they took along the same route, with varying degrees of happiness together.
Best for: A chronology of a marriage that spryly balances good times and bad.
The Lost Daughter (2021, Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s cool, cutting directorial debut proves the misogynistic truth that society will always query the plans of a middle-aged woman travelling alone – though the gradually unpacked secrets of watchful holidaymaker Leda (a never-better Olivia Colman) reveal a history of chafing against social norms.
Best for: An honest reflection on the value of solitude.
Midsommar (2019, Ari Aster)
Both nightmarish and streaked with acrid comedy, Ari Aster’s hypnotic second film sees an all-boys trip to Sweden for the rural midsummer festival first compromised when grieving girlfriend Dani (Florence Pugh) tags along, before her presence turns out to be the least of their problems.
Best for: A clinically punitive dissection of lads-on-tour mentality.
Shirley Valentine (1989, Lewis Gilbert)
Lewis Gilbert’s gentle comedy about a put-upon Liverpool housewife (Pauline Collins, expanding her Tony-winning one-woman show) who packs it all in for a spontaneous trip to Greece proved so popular that its very title has become a byword for a midlife feminist makeover. We all know someone who’s done a Shirley Valentine, don’t we?
Best for: Anyone who needs a little encouragement to put themselves first for once.
Speak No Evil (2022, Christian Tafdrup)
The first holiday in Danish director Christian Tafdrup’s blood-freezing horror film goes just fine: a Copenhagen family meets a fun-loving Dutch couple on holiday in Tuscany, and get on so well that, months later, they accept an invitation to join them at their woodsy home in the Netherlands. Big mistake. Huge. Find out why before a forthcoming remake with James McAvoy spoils the twisty reveal.
Best for: Validation for anyone who’d rather not talk to strangers abroad.
Thelma & Louise (1991, Ridley Scott)
This sun-scorched landmark of feminist pop cinema admittedly isn’t a holiday film for very long – the title characters’ mountain-retreat plans go to hell when a gun enters the equation early on – but it winds up as a very different, rather more life-changing story of open-road escape.
Best for: The ultimate girls’-trip vehicle.
Summertime (1955, David Lean)
OK, forget what I wrote about Venice earlier. In David Lean’s iridescent Technicolor travelogue, which sees Katharine Hepburn’s buttoned-up American tourist swept off her feet by a suave Italian antiques dealer, the sunken city becomes the site of pure wish-fulfilment – if not an entirely uncompromised happy ending.
Best for: The heart-swelling train-platform sendoff to end them all.
Us (2019, Jordan Peele)
The holiday home invasion is a staple trope of the horror genre, but it has never played out quite as it does in Jordan Peele’s ingenious allegorical investigation of black American class structures – in which Lupita Nyong’o’s family beach trip is violently interrupted by, well, a distorted replica of the family in question. All that, plus the creepiest pier funhouse you’ve ever seen.
Best for: A rude holiday reckoning with your own privilege.
