There are two kinds of summer movies. The popcorn films that draw you out of the melting heat into the coolness of the multiplex in high July, with big special effects and hero’s journeys. And then those films that linger with you all year long, maybe all life long, like sand in the heel of an old boat shoe. They evoke the emptiness and possibility of summer, the balmy months when everyone has time and no one has the energy or inclination to judge. When the same few songs play hypnotically on the radio and the warmth seems to turn us into looser, fuller versions of ourselves - at least until September snaps us back to attention. Summer is a time of transitions and rites of passage, the season of living between the institutional demands of schools, colleges and work. Long days without adult supervision are a ripe time for misbehaviour, whether for teenage girls at a beach club or men left alone in the city by their wives. Anything can happen. And frequently, anything does. These movies all bottle some of that languid summer magic, to be consumed long after summer is past.

It’s 1963 and a working-class boy, Jeff, played by Mr Matt Dillon, takes a job at a fancy Long Island beach club the summer before college. Soon he is ditching his pork pie hat, bored wives are tucking tips into the pockets of his tight, white trousers, and their daughters are ogling him from beside the pool. It’s a long way from his Brooklyn family, who warn him not to be taken in. First he’s dazzled, then he learns the treacherous ways of this affluent class on the beach and around the gin rummy table with the rich, older men at the Club Flamingo. It’s the ultimate internship.

Two surfers, Messrs Mike Hynson and Robert August, decide to escape California’s winter ocean to pursue an endless summer of surf around the world. It’s the 1960s, a time before surfing was overwhelmed by pushy kids on short boards and pumped-up Day-Glo contests. Their adventure is pure beach Zen, slender white boards arrowing down curling waves from Senegal to Australia to the sound of easy, surfer rock. They find their perfect wave in Cape St. Francis on the tip of South Africa, gentle, curling, as endless as their summer. If there was ever a movie equivalent of sand between your toes and a breeze on your face, this is it.

The last day of high school in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. A group of kids drifts around town, from an aborted keg party, to a pool hall, smoking dope, smashing up mailboxes, hooking up and fighting. But more than anything, talking. It sounds unpromising, yet there’s a reason Mr Quentin Tarantino said that it “may be the greatest hangout movie ever made”. Mr Matthew McConaughey secured his dudely reputation as Wooderson, the twentysomething stoner still chasing high school girls. "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age. Yes they do. Yes they do." (Director Mr Richard Linklater also captured a more adult, more European version of summer in his trilogy Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight.)

While not strictly a summer movie, it’s the summer scenes that linger in the mind. The Italian sun heating up a group of frigid young Americans to an emotional boil. Mr Jude Law as the golden youth, Dickie Greenleaf, Mr Matt Damon as the obsessive Tom Ripley and Ms Gwyneth Paltrow wafting through whitewashed rooms, her suspicions growing. There are no better depictions of trouble in paradise, of social hypocrisy and gilded dissolution hurtling towards tragedy. And even drenched in blood, the Mediterranean has rarely looked more enticing.

The Italian title Scandalo al Sole does it better justice. Two married couples meet at a Maine resort, and amid the piney, sea air realise that they married the wrong people. As their children fall in love, a husband pairs off with the other man’s wife, rekindling a romance they had had many years earlier. Despair, disappointment and alcoholism are redeemed by young love and second chances. The famous soundtrack, performed by Percy Faith and his Orchestra, suggests sweetness, whereas the film is pulpy melodrama. Best viewed with a lobster roll, blueberry pie, a stiff gin and tonic and several hankies to hand.

What is a fine young man to do? Benjamin Braddock, played by Mr Dustin Hoffman, comes home from college and is told the future lies in graduate school. Drifting through his summer, he succumbs to the beckoning finger of Mrs Robinson. He is spiritually lost in the bleached-out glare of southern California, until he realises that he loves Elaine, Mrs Robinson’s daughter. Summer is when the graduate yields to temptation before discovering who he is. It is a time of bedroom doors left ajar, of misspent afternoons, lunchtime cocktails, and if you’re lucky enough, just time enough for redemption.

Every character in Mr Spike Lee’s tale of one scorching, tumultuous day in the Bedford-Stuyvestant neighbourhood glistens with sweat. From the languid early morning to the riotous, tragic night, sitting on stoops, playing in the flow of opened fire hydrants and eating in Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. All the romance, profanity and danger of New York City in high summer, simmering along to the boom of Public Enemy. But this was the late 1980s. Now Bed-Stuy’s brownstones are coveted by ex-Manhattanites and the only fights are for spots on the local food co-op.

It’s an unpromising premise, a middle-aged bachelor stuck in Rome in August finds he can settle his mounting debts by taking care of three geriatric women, plus his own dotty mother, during the holidays. But Mr Gianni di Gregorio’s film is utterly charming. He drifts through an empty, sunbaked Rome, clutching a glass of white wine, assembling meals for his troublesome wards. The food looks so good, you want to reach out and bite the screen. Time stands completely still. You can keep your Tuscan sun and rambling villas. This is a very different kind of Italian seduction.