Heat on film: 21 movies where the temperature breaks people

Weekly collection in the app for the week of July 24, 2026.

Cinema has a subgenre nobody names: the heatwave film, where the temperature climbs until people crack. Spike Lee turned the hottest day in Bed-Stuy into American cinema's great pressure cooker; Australia contributed an outback nightmare; the French contributed a swimming pool.

This collection of 21 films ran as the weekly theme in the I Like Movies Discover tab for the week of July 24, 2026, at peak summer, featuring Do the Right Thing. Noir (Body Heat, Chinatown), war (Apocalypse Now) and slow-burn Korean menace (Burning) all sweat together here.

The collection

1. Do the Right Thing (1989) Spike Lee Featured On the hottest day of the summer, tensions on one Brooklyn block between an Italian-American pizzeria and its Black neighborhood build hour by hour toward explosion; Spike Lee's masterpiece. Cast: Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee
2. Apocalypse Now (1979) Coppola An army captain is sent up a Vietnamese river to assassinate a decorated colonel who has gone insane and built his own kingdom in the jungle; war film as fever dream. Cast: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Frederic Forrest
3. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Lumet A Brooklyn bank robbery goes wrong in the first five minutes and becomes a sweltering all-day hostage standoff and media circus; Pacino at his most desperate and human, from a true story. Cast: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning
4. Chinatown (1974) Polanski A 1930s Los Angeles private eye takes a routine adultery job and uncovers a conspiracy over the city's water, and something far worse; the most perfect screenplay ever taught. Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston
5. Body Heat (1981) Kasdan During a Florida heatwave, a not-too-bright lawyer falls for a married woman who wants her husband gone; sweat-soaked neo-noir where you can guess the trap and still enjoy it closing. Cast: William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Richard Crenna
6. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Lean T.E. Lawrence unites Arab tribes against the Ottomans and loses himself in the role; the desert epic whose 70mm vistas made the sun itself the antagonist. Cast: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Omar Sharif
7. The Wages of Fear (1953) Clouzot Four desperate men stranded in a South American oil town take a job driving trucks of nitroglycerin over mountain roads; two hours of the purest suspense ever filmed. Cast: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck
8. In the Heat of the Night (1967) Jewison A Black Philadelphia homicide detective passing through a Mississippi town gets arrested for a murder, then has to solve it alongside the racist police chief. Cast: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates
9. La piscine (1969) Deray Two lovers idle by a Riviera pool until her old flame arrives with his teenage daughter; envy and desire warm slowly toward murder. Delon and Romy Schneider at their most beautiful. Cast: Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet
10. Y tu mamá también (2001) Cuarón Two teenage boys and an unhappily married older woman road-trip to a possibly imaginary beach, while the narrator quietly notes the Mexico passing outside; sexy and then suddenly devastating. Cast: Maribel Verdú, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna
11. Burning (2018) Lee Chang-dong A delivery-job drifter reconnects with a childhood friend, who then vanishes after introducing her rich, bored new boyfriend, a man who claims he burns greenhouses; slow Korean menace with an ambiguous core. Cast: Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jeon Jong-seo
12. A Bigger Splash (2015) Guadagnino A rock star resting her voice on a Sicilian island has her retreat invaded by an exuberant old flame and his newly discovered daughter; sun, jealousy and one body in the pool. Cast: Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes
13. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) Minghella Sent to Italy to retrieve a playboy heir, a poor young man decides to become him instead, killing his way into the borrowed life; gorgeous and increasingly suffocating. Cast: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law
14. Spring Breakers (2012) Korine Four college girls rob a diner to fund a Florida spring break, get bailed out of jail by a cornrowed gangster-rapper, and slide into armed robbery; a neon fever dream, not the comedy it looks like. Cast: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens
15. Wake in Fright (1971) Kotcheff A schoolteacher stranded in an outback mining town is destroyed by beer, gambling and relentless male hospitality over one lost weekend; horror without a single monster. Cast: Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond, Chips Rafferty
16. The Swimmer (1968) Perry A tanned suburban man decides to swim home across the county through his neighbors' pools, and with each pool his confident story about his life falls further apart. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Janice Rule
17. Sexy Beast (2000) Glazer A safecracker retired to sun-drunk Spain is visited by Don Logan, the most terrifying man in British film, who will not take no to one last job; Kingsley plays him like a coiled snake. Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane
18. Stranger by the Lake (2013) Guiraudie At a lakeside cruising spot, a man witnesses a drowning that was no accident, and keeps returning to the killer anyway; desire and danger with no music and no way out. Cast: Pierre Deladonchamps, Christophe Paou, Patrick d'Assumçao
19. L'Avventura (1960) Antonioni A woman vanishes during a yacht trip to a barren island; her lover and best friend search, then drift into an affair and slowly stop looking. The scandal of Cannes 1960, now a cornerstone. Cast: Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari
20. Stromboli (1950) Rossellini A Lithuanian refugee marries an Italian fisherman to escape a camp and finds herself trapped on his brutal volcanic island; Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, ending on an ambiguous miracle. Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale, Renzo Cesana
21. Killer of Sheep (1978) Burnett A slaughterhouse worker in 1970s Watts drifts through insomnia, family and small neighborhood moments; shot for nothing on weekends, now preserved as an American classic. Cast: Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy

Keep your place

Save the ones that fit your mood to your watchlist in I Like Movies; when the next heatwave hits, the list is waiting. A new themed collection arrives in the Discover tab every Friday.

Questions people ask

Why is Do the Right Thing the featured film?

No film has ever tied weather to story tighter: one block, one day, the hottest of the year, and the heat is the fuse for everything that happens. It stays uncomfortably current decades later.

What is the scariest film on this list?

Wake in Fright (1971). Nothing supernatural: a schoolteacher stranded in an outback mining town, where beer, gambling and male hospitality curdle into horror. Scorsese championed its restoration.

The week before: Nature as protagonist: 21 films about the wild. The week after: The greatest documentaries: 21 essential films. See every weekly theme, or browse every guide, watch order and comparison.