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 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Napoleon Dynamite
Directed by Jared Hess
2004
It cost under half a million and grossed a hundred times that: an Idaho teenager, his brother's internet girlfriend, and a deadpan rhythm nobody has successfully copied.
★ 3.5
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