The classic summer movies worth revisiting this season

🍿There’s a version of summer that exists entirely on screen — long afternoons that bleed into warm evenings, the kind of unhurried pace that real life rarely delivers but cinema has always known how to fake. The films that capture it best aren’t necessarily the ones set on beaches or soundtracked by chart hits. They’re the ones that feel like the season itself: loose, a little electric, and just escapist enough to make a Friday night at home feel like a deliberate choice rather than a default.

In this week's edition of The Enterprise Guide, we're revisiting the films worth queuing up this season — sorted by mood for whatever kind of Friday night you're having. Some you’ll know frame by frame. Others you may not have thought about in years.

Family comedies

There’s a specific kind of family comedy that works for everyone in the room, regardless of age — not because it talks down to anyone, but because it’s built around a genuinely good story. These three have that in common.

#1- The Parent Trap (1998): A pre-fame Lindsay Lohan plays identical twins separated at birth who meet at summer camp, clock each other immediately, and hatch an elaborate plan to reunite their parents. It sounds thin on paper, but somehow it isn’t — Nancy Meyers directs it with warmth and real comic timing, and the camp sequences in particular hold up better than most films of the era.

The film also benefits from a genuinely charming supporting cast, including a scene-stealing Elaine Hendrix as the villain-adjacent fiancée the girls are determined to derail. A near-perfect family watch.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for streaming on Disney+.

#2- Matilda (1996): Danny DeVito adapts Roald Dahl’s beloved novel and stars in it, playing the spectacularly useless Mr. Wormwood opposite Mara Wilson’s Matilda — a child genius born into a family entirely indifferent to her existence. The film walks the line between dark and delightful that Dahl always intended, and it does so without softening either edge. Thirty years on, it remains one of the better children’s films ever made — funny, strange, and furious on behalf of every kid who ever felt overlooked.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for rent on Apple TV.

#3- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989): Rick Moranis accidentally miniaturizes his children and the neighbors’ kids with a homemade shrink ray, and the bulk of the film follows them navigating a suddenly enormous backyard — sprinklers become floods, ants become allies, and a lawnmower is a genuine existential threat. The premise is absurd, and the film commits to it completely. It’s pure summer filmmaking — outdoor, sun-drenched, and cheerfully inventive. Exactly the right energy for a hot night in.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for streaming on Disney+.

Summer romances

The late ‘90s were peak rom-com — a moment when the genre had genuine wit, before it curdled into formula. All three films here are from that window, and all three are better than you might remember.

#1- 10 Things I Hate About You (1999): A loose Shakespeare adaptation — The Taming of the Shrew transplanted to a Seattle high school — that works because it takes its characters seriously, even when the plot doesn’t. Heath Ledger is effortlessly charming as Patrick Verona, Julia Stiles is sharp and funny as Kat, and the film earns its ending in a way most rom-coms of the era don’t. The stadium scene alone is worth the watch.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for streaming on Disney+.

#2- Notting Hill (1999): Hugh Grant plays a mild-mannered London bookshop owner who falls for the world’s most famous actress, played by Julia Roberts, at the height of her stardom — which gives the casting a meta quality the film knows exactly how to use. Richard Curtis’s script is warmer and funnier than its reputation suggests, and the supporting cast, including Rhys Ifans as the world's worst flatmate, makes every scene around the central romance earn its keep.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for rent on Apple TV.

#3- My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997): Julia Roberts again, but in a very different register — playing a food critic who realizes she’s in love with her best friend the week he announces he’s marrying someone else. What makes the film unusual is that it doesn’t give her an easy out: she behaves badly, she knows it, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise. Smarter and darker than the marketing suggested at the time, with a Cameron Diaz performance that’s better than it got credit for and a Rupert Everett supporting turn that steals every scene he’s in.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for rent on Apple TV.

Summer thrillers

Not every Friday night calls for something comfortable. These three are for the evenings when you want something that keeps you honest — tense, propulsive, and not entirely willing to let you look away.

#1- Jaws 2 (1978): Amity Island has a shark problem, to put it simply, and the people in charge still haven’t learned anything from the events of the previous movie. Jaws 2 is a competent, genuinely tense sequel that earns its place in the franchise. The teenage ensemble it introduces gives the second half real momentum, and the open-water finale delivers exactly what you came for. It might, however, trigger fears of swimming in the Mediterranean.

WHERE TO WATCH- The franchise is available for rent on Apple TV.

#2- The Fugitive (1993): Harrison Ford is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, survives a spectacular train crash during a prison transfer, and spends the next two hours trying to find the real killer while Tommy Lee Jones — delivering one of cinema’s great supporting performances — hunts him with relentless, cheerful efficiency across Chicago. The film earned Jones an Oscar and it deserved to. It’s as tightly constructed a thriller as the decade produced — no wasted scenes, no wasted minutes. If you’ve only seen it once, you’ve missed half of what it's doing.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for rent on Apple TV.

#3- The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Jodie Foster plays FBI trainee Clarice Starling, who is tasked with interviewing imprisoned psychiatrist and cannibal Hannibal Lecter — Anthony Hopkins, in fewer than 25 minutes of screen time — to help profile a serial killer still at large. The film snagged all five major Oscars, a feat only two other films in history have matched, and it’s not hard to see why.

This is the darkest film on the list by some distance. Not a watch for young children, nor one to put on if you’re after something easy. But if the evening calls for something that genuinely unsettles you, nothing here comes close.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for rent on Apple TV.

Nostalgic dramas

These are the films that linger. Less about plot than about feeling — the distinct texture of a summer that changed something, a friendship that mattered, a life in the middle of becoming.

#1- Stand by Me (1986): Four boys in small-town Oregon set out to find a dead body in the woods — and what they find instead, inevitably, is each other. Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella is the definitive coming-of-age film of its decade: funny, melancholic, and completely honest about the intensity of childhood friendships that don’t survive into adulthood.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for rent on Apple TV.

#2- Grease (1978): Sandy and Danny's summer romance, tested by the social hierarchies of Rydell High, set to some of the most recognizable songs ever put to film. The plot is paper-thin and always was — Grease works because of its energy, its cast, and the sheer commitment of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John to selling every scene, regardless of whether it makes sense. Decades on, it’s one of the most enjoyable musicals out there — even if it’s absurd at times.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for rent on Apple TV.

#3- Forrest Gump (1994): Tom Hanks plays Forrest Gump — a man of limited intellect and unlimited sincerity — whose life intersects with three decades of American history entirely by accident. It’s a film about luck, love, and the strange randomness of a life well lived, and it earns every one of its two hours and twenty minutes.

Robert Zemeckis directs with control over tone — the film moves between comedy and grief without ever feeling manipulative. The running sequence remains one of cinema’s great images of uncomplicated forward motion. A film worth returning to every few years.

WHERE TO WATCH- Available for streaming on Shahid.