Pretty in Pink
Directed by Howard Deutch
1986
Molly Ringwald's prom dress is stitched together from two others, an image the whole film runs on: Howard Deutch directs a John Hughes script about who gets to sit where.
★ 3.2
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
The Bad News Bears
Directed by Michael Ritchie
1976
The children swear constantly, the coach drinks in the dugout, and nobody learns very much: Walter Matthau took a Little League team and made the least sentimental sports film ever released.
★ 3.3
Scent of a Woman
Directed by Martin Brest
1992
Al Pacino spent months learning to hold his eyes unfocused and never once looks at anything: a blind retired colonel hires a prep school student for one enormous weekend in New York.
★ 3.3
The Sandlot
Directed by David Mickey Evans
1993
It has become the film American men quote at each other about being eleven: a new kid in 1962 learns baseball on a vacant lot, and the stakes are imaginary and total.
★ 3.9
Cooley High
Directed by Michael Schultz
1975
The Black American Graffiti, and better: Chicago teenagers in 1964 with a wall-to-wall Motown soundtrack, and Michael Schultz films a few days of hanging around as if nothing mattered more.
★ 4.1
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Directed by Stephen Chbosky
2012
Stephen Chbosky wrote the novel, wrote the screenplay and directed it himself, which almost never works: a freshman is taken up by two seniors, and the tunnel scene earned its reputation.
★ 4.4
Sixteen Candles
Directed by John Hughes
1984
John Hughes cast Molly Ringwald off a headshot and wrote the script over one weekend: the first film that treated a teenage girl's ordinary bad day as worth ninety minutes of attention.
★ 4.7
Risky Business
Directed by Paul Brickman
1983
Tom Cruise became a movie star in one scene in his underwear: Tangerine Dream scores a suburban comedy that is much colder and stranger than its reputation suggests.
★ 4.7
The Motorcycle Diaries
Directed by Walter Salles
2004
Before he was a poster, Ernesto Guevara was a medical student on a broken motorcycle: Walter Salles shot the actual route through South America, and the politics arrive as things seen.
★ 4.8
Bambi
Directed by David Hand
1942
Disney kept live fawns at the studio so the animators could watch them move: the backgrounds are painted like Chinese landscape scrolls, and the film trusts weather and silence where other cartoons talk.
★ 5.0
Empire of the Sun
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1987
Christian Bale was thirteen and carries the entire film: Spielberg follows an English boy separated from his parents in occupied Shanghai, and never lets the war become an adventure.
★ 5.4
Big
Directed by Penny Marshall
1988
Penny Marshall became the first woman to direct a film that made a hundred million dollars: Tom Hanks plays a thirteen-year-old in an adult body and never once winks at the audience.
★ 5.6
Juno
Directed by Jason Reitman
2007
Diablo Cody won an Oscar for dialogue that no teenager has ever spoken, and it works anyway: a sixteen-year-old handles a pregnancy with more composure than every adult around her.
★ 5.6
Breaking Away
Directed by Peter Yates
1979
No sports film is sweeter, and the sport barely matters: an Indiana teenager pretends to be Italian because he loves bicycle racing, and the town's class divide does the rest.
★ 5.7
A Bronx Tale
Directed by Robert De Niro
1993
Chazz Palminteri turned down large offers for his one-man play until someone would let him star: De Niro directed his first film out of it, about a boy with two fathers competing.
★ 5.8
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Directed by Amy Heckerling
1982
Cameron Crowe enrolled in a California high school undercover for a year and wrote down what he heard: the result launched half a decade of careers and still sounds like actual teenagers.
★ 5.9
Superbad
Directed by Greg Mottola
2007
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg began writing it at thirteen and it shows: one night, a catastrophic fake ID, and a friendship neither boy can say anything about directly.
★ 6.0
Dead Poets Society
Directed by Peter Weir
1989
Nobody who saw it at the right age has stopped quoting it: Robin Williams plays a teacher who tells boys at a 1959 boarding school that poetry is worth risking something for.
★ 6.0
Carrie
Directed by Brian De Palma
1976
Stephen King's first novel became this, and no adaptation since has been meaner: De Palma films high-school cruelty in slow motion and split screen, and the prom is a fifteen-minute held breath.
★ 6.2
Clueless
Directed by Amy Heckerling
1995
Amy Heckerling relocated Jane Austen's Emma to Beverly Hills without losing a thing: she collected the vocabulary from real teenagers, the film sent it back amplified, and the heroine is never the joke.
★ 6.3
Mean Girls
Directed by Mark Waters
2004
Tina Fey adapted a parenting book about teenage girls into the most quoted comedy of its decade: the anthropology is accurate, and the cruelty is presented as a system rather than a person.
★ 6.3
Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
2008 · United Kingdom
Boyle shot Mumbai on small digital cameras in real streets and Rahman's score carried it around the world: a contestant from the slums is detained for cheating, and each question opens a memory.
★ 6.4
Boyz n the Hood
Directed by John Singleton
1991
Singleton came straight out of USC film school and filmed the neighborhood he grew up in: South Central rendered as a place where a father raising his son is itself a full-time job.
★ 6.8
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Directed by John Hughes
1986
Truancy has never looked this appealing: Ferris talks straight to the audience, takes a Ferrari and a parade, and the whole film is completely on his side.
★ 6.8
The Breakfast Club
Directed by John Hughes
1985
Five teenagers in one room for a Saturday detention, and every teen film since has been rearranging the same five: Hughes let them talk instead of doing anything.
★ 6.9
Amarcord
Directed by Federico Fellini
1973 · Italy
Fellini remembering his own seaside town under Mussolini and admitting he is embroidering it: no plot at all, just a year of weather, sex, food and fascism.
★ 6.9
Stand By Me
Directed by Rob Reiner
1986
Nothing else captures being twelve years old this exactly: four boys walk along a railway line for two days, and the narration knows precisely how much it mattered.
★ 7.0
Rebel Without a Cause
Directed by Nicholas Ray
1955
The teenager as a subject starts here: James Dean in a red jacket, a knife fight at an observatory, and parents who have no idea what is happening.
★ 7.0
Almost Famous
Directed by Cameron Crowe
2000
Cameron Crowe was writing for Rolling Stone at fifteen and on the road with the Allman Brothers at sixteen: the film gets every detail right, including the boredom.
★ 7.3
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2001 · Mexico
A road trip with a narrator who keeps interrupting to tell you things the characters will never know: Cuaron slips a portrait of Mexico under a teenage sex comedy.
★ 7.3
American Graffiti
Directed by George Lucas
1973
One night of cruising in 1962, with the radio playing wall to wall from start to finish: Lucas caught an America that was about to stop existing.
★ 7.3
Ratatouille
Directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava
2007
Almost nothing else takes both cooking and criticism this seriously: a rat with a palate steers a hapless human around a Paris kitchen, and the food looks extraordinary.
★ 7.3
Dazed and Confused
Directed by Richard Linklater
1993
Nothing happens and that is the entire point: Linklater catches the last day of school in 1976 so exactly that people who were not there remember it anyway.
★ 7.3
The Last Picture Show
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
1971
Bogdanovich insisted on monochrome in 1971, when absolutely nobody did that: a Texas town running out of reasons to exist, and the teenagers running out along with it.
★ 7.4
Lady Bird
Directed by Greta Gerwig
2017
Gerwig's first solo film became the best reviewed of its year: a Sacramento teenager and her mother fight about everything, and the film refuses to take a side.
★ 7.6
Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
2016
One life told in three chapters by three different actors, and shot in blues and purples so tender the film almost hums: nothing about it looks like anything else.
★ 8.4
The Graduate
Directed by Mike Nichols
1967
A generation was told their parents were wrong and believed it: Nichols made aimlessness look cinematic, and the soundtrack put Simon and Garfunkel into every house in America.
★ 8.5
Boyhood
Directed by Richard Linklater
2014
Nobody had tried this before: Linklater filmed the same cast a few days a year for twelve years, so you watch a real child turn into a real adult.
★ 8.5
Pather Panchali
Directed by Satyajit Ray
1955
Indian cinema arrived in the world with this: Ray shot it on weekends with a first-time crew and no money, and the children seeing a train is pure wonder.
★ 8.5