The 50 Best Teen Movies

One of the most important ingredients in a great teen movie is a killer soundtrack – and Gurinder Chadha's Bruce Springsteen-centric coming-of-age story certainly has one. But the wrinkle here is that The Boss wasn't that cool to mid-'80s kids ("He's more what your dad listens to!"), making central Pakistani-British teen Javed (Viveik Kalra) even more of an outsider in the age of synth-pop. If the words of Brooce offer deeper meaning and validation as he asserts his identity against his traditionalist parents and a rising tide of National Front fascists, Javed's goals are classic teen movie stuff: become a writer, kiss a girl, and prove he was born to run by getting out of Luton.Read The Empire Review

Charting the strains and struggles of a group of Ladbroke Grove teens, Menhaj Huda's film, written by Noel Clarke – who also plays the menacing Sam – is a very different kind of teen movie, a stark examination of young British life in the inner cities. Sex, drugs and especially violence are treated with an unflinching eye, the drama literally refusing to pull punches (or, in a key moment, a baseball bat). It's primarily the story of Trevor AKA "Trife", played with grit and real emotion by Aml Ameen), who is juggling his feelings of despair over his ex-girlfriend's potential pregnancy by the psychotic Sam. It can be tough to watch at times, but you won't soon forget it. Read The Empire Review

Don't scoff – it got a kicking in some corners at the time (as plenty of teen-girl-focused pop culture tends to), but Catherine Hardwicke's YA adaptation that kick-started an entire blockbuster sub-genre has earned its place in the teen-movie pantheon. Reinventing the vampire myth in a PG-13 tale of star-crossed high schoolers (or is he?), Twilight moved beyond the sun-kissed worlds of Mean Girls and Clueless for a chillier, moodier tale of dangerous passion in the Pacific Northwest. Kristen Stewart and Robert 'R-Pattz' Pattinson are an iconic duo (though both have since spent their careers moving as far away from it as possible), and the film is a time-capsule of late-'00s angsty alternative teen culture, with its deathly-pale outsider heroes and genuinely great soundtrack (Radiohead, Iron & Wine, Muse).Read The Empire Review

If the gross-out teen sex-com has long been an American tradition, the formula found a natural British home in the big-screen exploits of The Inbetweeners. With the hit sitcom taking Will and co to the end of sixth form, Iain Morris and Damon Beesley's film sent the gang – in true TV-to-movie leap form – on holiday, their last big blow-out before university and working life beckons. The result is a lot like the series itself – brash and crass on the surface (the word 'clunge' appears regularly), but tender and sweet underneath it all, exploring the bravado of British teens and the underlying insecurity that underpins lad culture at large. And if nothing else, in shooting on the 'strip' in Malia, it forever committed the late-00's/ early-'10s 'lads holiday' to celluloid.Read The Empire Review

After writing the likes of Gremlins, The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes, Chris Columbus made his directorial debut with this spritely urban fairy-tale (for some reason in Britain it was re-titled with the stunningly bland A Night On The Town). Let down by her boyfriend, high school student Chris Parker (a super-likeable Elisabeth Shue) agrees to look after three kids, only to receive a desperate call from bestie Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller) to come and pick up her in downtown Chicago. What follows is a series of big city escapades including singing the blues in a nightclub, gang fights, and climbing down a building. At the time, it fell into a sub-genre of lost-in-the-city nightmares —think Scorsese's After Hours with acne — but now feels like a lodestar of '80s nostalgia. Jonah Hill's The Sitter tried to do an updated riff with far less charm and more huff and puff. As Shue's Chris memorably puts it: "Don't fuck with the babysitter."Read The Empire Review

Beyond all the magic and the mythology, the Harry Potter films are classic British secondary-school romps – and Order Of The Phoenix is the teen movie-est of the bunch, all rebellion and romance as the Hogwarts students fight back against Dolores Umbridge's oppressive regime. But the formation of Dumbledore's Army and the escalating teens vs. the establishment tension isn't the only thing distracting Harry from his impending OWL exams – there's also his burgeoning feelings for Ravenclaw's Cho Chang (whose ex Cedric Diggory died last time around, adding yet more angst) leading to our hero's first kiss, an awkward smooch under the mistletoe. Plus, troublemakers Fred and George interrupting a silent exam with a massive middle-finger firework display is a quintessential high school movie prank.Read The Empire Review

Hailee Steinfeld had already established herself as a rising star with her Oscar-winning turn in True Grit. In collaboration with writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig, who used her own awkward teenage experiences as fuel for the film, the pair took the usual story of disaffected youth and made it feel fresh. Steinfeld's Nadine is ready to end it all – or so she claims to teacher Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson, doing a lot with a relatively small part). It's all been downhill since her father died, her older brother turned into a handsome jock and, to make matters so much more cringeworthy, started dating her best friend. Nadine's frustrated, feeling left out and desperately unhappy, but the script and Steinfeld make her feel more rounded than many movie teens in her situation. Read The Empire Review

Growing up can be brutally hard – and few movies capture that so directly or sensitively as Stephen Chbosky's teen drama, the writer-director adapting his own his epistolary novel. If it has all the watchability of the genre's more lighthearted fare, the '90s-set story of lonely kid Charlie (Logan Lerman) and the two older kids who befriend him – closeted arty kid Patrick (Ezra Miller) and livewire Sam (Emma Watson) – takes in depression, anxiety, death, grief, suicide, and abuse in a way that feels open, honest, and judgment-free. For all the darkness, it nails the teen rites of passage – the drama of school dances, falling head-over-heels for outsider pop culture (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and the mind-blowing experience of hearing David Bowie's 'Heroes' for the first time.Read The Empire Review

Some of the greatest teen movies focus on the oddballs – and few balls are odder than Jon Heder's buck-toothed, curly-haired, dead-eyed Napoleon Dynamite. Jared Hess's directorial debut revels in the weirdness of Napoleon and his world – a heightened, era-melding slice of small-town Idaho where our hero lives with his quad-biking grandma and equally strange older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). The plot, such as there is one, finds Napoleon wooing classmate Deb (Tina Majorino) and helping his friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) run in the school elections ('Vote For Pedro') – but it's the awkward humour of the central character that's the main draw, the film falling midway between American teen movie tropes and Sundance indie fare. Plus, the final dance routine – to Jamiroquai's 'Canned Heat' – is a comic setpiece for the ages.Read The Empire Review

"Hell is a teenage girl." That's the central point of Karyn Kusama's mis-sold and under-appreciated – and now, thankfully, re-appraised – comedy-horror. Marketed to men as a lecherous Megan Fox vehicle, it's really a raucous treatise on adolescent female friendships – Amanda Seyfried is Needy, the bookish high-schooler whose longtime best friend Jennifer (Fox) becomes a literal demonic man-eater after being ritually sacrificed by a whiny emo band. Like a long-lost feature-length Buffy episode, it's a funny and freaky high school metaphor boasting great performances (from Fox especially), and crackling dialogue from Diablo Cody, whose intentionally over-cranked teen-speak is perhaps more suited to this than the more-celebrated Juno. Go on, give it a re-watch.Read The Empire Review

While Spider-Man approaches the superhero genre from a unique teen perspective, for years of comics and movies it was from a nerdy white guy. That all changed in Into The Spider-Verse, bringing comic book favourite Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) onto the big screen at last and giving audiences an Afro-Latino teen superhero. Beyond the revolutionary animation and dizzying multiverse storytelling, it's the instantly-loveable Miles himself that makes Spider-Verse so exceptional – a Brooklyn-dwelling, Jordan-wearing, Chance The Rapper-listening kid who's way cooler than Peter Parker, while still dealing with the awkwardness of talking to girls and figuring out his sticky-handed, super-sense powers ("It's just puberty!" is his internal mantra). It's a perfect re-centring of a long-told (and often re-told) story, while staying completely true to the essence of Spider-Man.Read The Empire Review

Joining the pantheon of teen classics set across a single, eventful day, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg channeled their teenage dynamic into a silly, sweary one-night odyssey hinged on the ultimate teen test: securing booze for a party while underage. Their younger avatars (the characters are literally called Seth and Evan) are Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, the former a brash blabbermouth, the latter sweet and shy – but it's Christopher Mintz-Plasse who steals the show as weirdo Fogell, who famously gets the worst fake ID in movie history: the legendary alias 'McLovin'. If some of Superbad's coarser gags haven't aged brilliantly, it's still a riotously fun ride – and ultimately sweet, culminating in two best friends admitting how much they'll miss each other when college sends them separate ways.Read The Empire Review

"I'm the Marcia fucking Brady of the Upper East Side, and sometimes I want to kill myself." It's not the sort of dialogue you would encounter in the original novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (itself already adapted into 1988's Dangerous Liaisons) – Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions taking the story of scheming rich types and giving it a teen twist, transposed to privileged New York high schoolers. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe ooze devious smarm as step-siblings Kathryn Merteuil and Sebastian Valmont, who plot to see whether the latter can deflower Selma Blair's sweet, naive Cecile Caldwell. Watching the serpents coil slowly around their prey, only for their plan to end up crushing them, is compelling. Around them, the cast is stacked with talent, including Reese Witherspoon, Joshua Jackson, Christine Baranski and Louise Fletcher among them.Read The Empire Review

Fitting in is a key crisis in both teen life and for those on screen – and it's even tougher when you're a nerd living in one of the toughest neighbourhoods in the States. That's the dilemma faced by young Malcolm (Shameik Moore), trying to blend in among the tough LA suburb of The Bottoms – and while drugs, gangs and violence haunt the place, Dope is far from a grim-dark dive into terror. Rick Famuyiwa's film has buckets of charm, boasting a fantastic cast of rising names including Kiersey Clemons, Zoe Kravitz and LaKeith Stanfield. But it's Moore who is the anchor engaging and supremely entertaining as a young man just trying to make his way – and attend a secret party.Read The Empire Review

Not many movies can claim to have launched a multi-generational fanbase (at least outside of huge franchises), but such is the power of Patrick Swayze's smoulder. Okay, so Dirty Dancing is about much more than that, following Frances "Baby" Houseman (Jennifer Grey) to a resort in New York's Catskills area with her wealthy family for their annual summer retreat. Cue a life-changing experience, as she flirts with, moves with and falls in love with hip-swiveling dance instructor Johnny (Swayze). Dirty Dancing traces a familiar path of lovers from different sides of the tracks falling afoul of parents and circumstance, but it does it in such compelling fashion that you rarely notice the template. And while many teen movies have good soundtracks, few can boast an Oscar-winning song – let alone one as iconic as '(I've Had) The Time of My Life'.Read The Empire Review

They travel through time, they chill with Beethoven, they alter history. But above all else, Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan are most excellent at being teenagers. Partying on is the priority, as it invariably is, and should be. Their eyes sparkle with joy. They're alive! There's Van Halen, there are young women around, there are waistcoats to rock… What's not to love? Appropriately, when this carefree idyll is threatened, as Ted's father threatens to send him to military boarding school in Alaska, you'll never see a more crestfallen creature – such is the melodrama of teen life. "Alaska", he emphasises to Bill, as if such a fate is the end of the world. For him, it would be. This film is a paean to non-responsibility, and it's a balm. Read The Empire Review

Before he invoked the ire of a million whining man-babies with The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson's output was awash with quirky indie hits – but none quirkier or more ballsy than this hardboiled high school mystery. A teen re-imagining of a Dashiell Hammett novel, Brick took the gumshoe format and set it slap bang in the middle of a high school with Joseph Gordon Levitt as a student who receives a panicked call from his girlfriend that begins the search for both her and a missing brick of heroin. Johnson effortlessly imposes noir archetypes over those of American high schoolers, spicing up his zippy script with detective patois more evocative of a Bogart flick than a high school drama. A love letter to the genre, never a spoof, Brick is gloriously bold genre mashup that earmarked both Johnson and Gordon-Levitt for future greatness.Read The Empire Review

If John Hughes' high school rom-coms are in many ways outdated, Susan Johnson's film continues their legacy with fizz and wit. Lana Condor is incredibly charming as Lara Jean Covey (whose name is always said in full), a high school junior whose intense crushes are channelled into love letters she stashes away, unsent, in a box – until her little sister mails them all out. Navigating the romantic fallout (and trying to hide her crush on her older sister's ex), she strikes up a fake relationship with Noah Centineo's hunky Peter. It's a fresh take on the Sixteen Candles formula that pays tribute to that film (while noting its egregious racist stereotypes), and as a Netflix original movie it proved a game-changer, delivered directly to its always-online Gen-Z audience. Plus, it's refreshing and all-too-rare to have a Korean-American protagonist in a predominantly-white genre – an identity further explored in 2020 sequel To All The Boys: P.S. I Still Love You and 2021's To All The Boys: Always And Forever.Read The Empire Review

If you've ever wondered why Lady Bird's Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) has red hair, blame Pretty In Pink. Greta Gerwig's favourite Molly Ringwald flick, directed by Howard Deutch and written by the prolific poet laureate of '80s teendom John Hughes, pitches Ringwald as Andie, a high school outcast who lives with her pop (Harry Dean Stanton, a contender for best movie dad), is friends with outsider-who-secretly-loves-her Duckie (Jon Cryer) and is asked to the prom by preppy cool kid Blaine (Andrew McCarthy). What it lacks in originality, Pretty In Pink makes up for in warmth, humour, a killer soundtrack (OMD, INXS, and the title song by Psychedelic Furs), James Spader as a punchable baddie and, in Ringwald, a believable teenage girl who is so easy to root for: the iconic moment she makes her own pink prom dress to New Order's 'Thieves Like Us' is teen movie hall of fame stuff.Read The Empire Review

In a genre dominated by quippy leads and awkward exploits, it takes a lot to stand out – and Juno does just that. Jason Reitman, fresh off of making Thank You For Smoking, brought a keen eye and grasp of good characters. Diablo Cody's script found a level of humanity amidst the quirk (eschewing actual teen-speak for a heightened, invented teen dialect). And Ellen Page makes the titular Juno MacGuff so instantly root-worthy that you can't help but be in her corner. Falling unexpectedly pregnant, Juno decides to put the child up for adoption, setting everything in motion herself before informing her parents (a perfect pairing of Alison Janney and JK Simmons). And then there's Michael Cera as her baby daddy and distracted best friend Paulie. From its Kimya Dawson-strewn soundtrack to its rotoscoped stop-motion title sequence, everything works.Read The Empire Review

Caught between the predominantly-Black neighbourhood of Garden Heights that she grew up in, and the predominantly-white prep school she attends, the story of Starr Carter (Amanda Stenberg) is all set to be an exploration of identity, packed with the usual teen exploits – crushes, parties, and friendship politics. And then her childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith) is shot by a racist cop right in front of her, and the pressures of adolescence, of blatant and underlying racism in America, of vastly differing levels of privilege all come crashing down on her. George Tillman Jr.'s adaptation of Angie Thomas' hit YA novel is a powerful, purposeful piece of work that points the largely white middle-class lens of the teen movie genre in a different direction. And if it works brilliantly for a teenage audience, its nuanced approach to weighty subject matter means it needs to be seen universally.Read The Empire Review

With its central cadre of teenage witches and How Soon Is Now on the soundtrack, it's easy to see how The Craft laid the supernatural seeds for hit series Charmed. Andrew Fleming's film about a quartet of high school girls who give in to the lure of the arcane and summon dark powers to smite their enemies (and ultimately each other) is what one can only assume would happen if John Hughes had sat down to write a screenplay in sheep's blood under the light of a full moon. Part black comedy, part feminist tract, part coming-of-age high school yarn, The Craft is a magical teen movie in every sense (this despite none of the principal cast being within a football pitch of their teenage years).Read The Empire Review

Wes Anderson's glorious second feature focuses on an absurd love triangle between 15-year-old schoolboy Max Fischer, his teacher Rosemary (Olivia Williams) and industrialist Herman (Bill Murray). But it's all about Max. Max (Jason Schwartzman, the most perfect casting in the history of cinema) is a delightful horrorshow of a teen, a compelling cocktail of seemingly misguided quirks. Wildly precocious, he is bizarrely confident, unforgivably arrogant and unbridled in his ambition, founding clubs (beekeeping, astronomy) and putting on plays (his DIY take on Apocalypse Now is something to behold) like there's no tomorrow, while scrimping on the actual academia. Max has not yet been quelled. But there's a lot to be said for his lack of boundaries. With age, his edges will most likely be softened, as they often are. In that process though, we lose a lot. Here's to being unrestrained.Read The Empire Review

Richard Kelly's debut feature isn't just another story of a disenfranchised teen, adolescent love and loss, dance troupes, spectral rabbits and sex dungeons. No, Donnie Darko is altogether different – a mind-bending, time-twisting, dimension-spanning take on the high school experience, shot in the 28 days during which the story unfurls. A baby-faced Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Donnie, a disturbed student who is roused from his bed and led on sleepwalks by the commanding voice of a man-sized rabbit named Frank, only to vandalise his school, uncover a celebrity paedophile, and set himself on a course to prevent the end of the world. It's a batshit concept executed with stylish confidence and the film that not only put Gyllenhaal on the map, but presented us with Frank's now iconic bunny mask to boot.Read The Empire Review

Across decades of movies, teenagers' quests to lose their virginity before leaving high school were the near-sole preserve of male characters. Kay Cannon's comedy flips that script, offering up three smart, hilarious and determined girls – Julie (Kathryn Newton), Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Sam (Gideon Adlon) – with a pact to each pop their cherry on that most hallowed of evenings: prom night. If half of the film is dedicated to their horrified parents' attempts to stop any funny business (hence the title), the teen-focused other half delivers an unapologetic, sex-positive, inclusive portrayal of young women's autonomy and sexual desire without ever being exploitative or condescending. More importantly, it's funny as hell – its three near-unknown leads destined for bright futures.Read The Empire Review

While it never quite reaches the giddy heights of Clueless or 10 Things I Hate About You, this Emma Stone vehicle comes close – and continues the classic-literature-as-teen-movie trend. Will Gluck's film takes some inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter – Stone's Olive Penderghast cast as the Hester Prynne of her school after a series of who-slept-with-who rumours spiral out of control. She puts in a stellar comic performance, evidently a ready-made star, careening through a pacy screenplay packed with heavy-handed John Hughes nods. The MVPs, though? Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are perhaps the best teen movie parents of all time, a total hoot as Olive's easygoing mum and dad, gifted all the best lines.Read The Empire Review

Spider-Man is a distinct comic book character for being a heroic high-schooler – and no Spider-Man film has quite understood that like Homecoming. Tom Holland is by far the most believably-teenage Peter Parker, and if he's not quite as tortured as Tobey Maguire's incarnation, he's still juggling his superhero fantasies, local neighbourhood obligations, school work, and gooey feelings. Director Jon Watts was heavily influenced by John Hughes, and it shows – but Homecoming also moves the teen movie genre forward, pushing beyond outdated cliquey cliches. Here, bully Flash is an obnoxious preppy rich-kid rather than a beefy jock, and Zendaya's 'MJ' is a quirky deadpan weirdo – more Ally Sheedy than Molly Ringwald. All that, and it has a punky Ramones-fuelled soundtrack to boot.Read The Empire Review

Freddy Krueger began as a human monster – a serial-killing maniac – before becoming an actual one, his burnt spectre haunting kids in their dreams, eventually becoming an even bigger one, who well and truly took over a never-ending franchise of sequels, meta-sequels, spin-offs and reboots. But the original A Nightmare On Elm Street was the kids' story, Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and her suburban teen network going through a more human hell (mostly involving caffeine), attempting to live their best lives (i.e. argue with their parents and have sex) while avoiding the blades of the wisecracking, fedora-wearing knife fetishist. Freddy – a psychological manifestation of heightened teenage fears and desires – will not stop, but neither, ultimately, will Nancy, galvanised by her diminishing gang, mounting her own uprising, her eyes firmly on her future. She is the epitome of teen moxie. Read The Empire Review

At the end of the '80s came a riposte to the decade's unattainable ideals and cheesy sentimentality, giving us a charismatic anti-hero in Christian Slater's JD and a stone-cold heroine in Winona Ryder's Veronica. JD – a homage to James Dean and JD Salinger, two of the 20th century's biggest teen icons – is a bit of a jerk, all snark and smirk. Veronica though, part of a popular crew all otherwise called Heather, kicks against the clique as she breaks off the shackles of uniform popularity, seeing through the superficiality that props up the school, as well as JD's nihilistic nonsense. A response to years of John Hughes movies, Heathers was a subversive shock to the system, and sustains today as a battle cry for the outcasts, the misfits, and those who are tired of all the boxes they get shoved into. For them, this is what teen life actually felt like.Read The Empire Review

As a teen movie, Love, Simon is exceptional for being the first major American studio production to centre on a gay protagonist. As an LGBTQ+ movie, Love, Simon is exceptional for how unexceptional it is – a charming, funny, straight-up, ultra-mainstream teenage rom-com. The titular Simon (Nick Robinson) is the closeted high schooler who enters an email correspondence with another anonymous gay kid at his school. When the emails leak, it's up to Simon to navigate the fallout and take control of his own story. If it's significant for representing gay romance and putting its coming out story centre stage, everything else about Love, Simon is quintessential teen movie – playground politics, fancy dress parties, a rousing fairground finale, and a heart-bursting soundtrack of sensitive pop from Jack Antonoff's Bleachers.Read The Empire Review

If you know anything about Say Anything, you'll know it's the teen flick where John Cusack stands under Ione Skye's window and, holding up a boom box, blasts out Peter Gabriel's 'In Your Eyes' (it was originally going to be Fishbone's 'Question Of Life') in a desperate attempt to win her back. But Cameron Crowe's directorial debut is so much more than that. Within a simple triangular dynamic between Cusack's underachieving eternal optimist Lloyd Dobler (A+ character name), Skye's overachieving student Diane and her over-protective father (John Mahoney), Crowe's writing and direction invests standard teen situations with wit ("I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen"), depth and generosity of spirit. Both Skye and Mahoney are terrific, but this is Cusack's movie, creating a winning teen hero that is at once quintessentially Gen X, but also for the ages. Read The Empire Review

Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor took Tom Perrotta's novel and fashioned a satire of not just high school life, but a scathing look at popularity politics and the back-stabbing that can occur even at the level of Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick. As the driven wannabe student body president, Witherspoon is the perfect distillation of acid ambition and a young woman still trying to figure out her role in life. And then there's Matthew Broderick returning to the teen movie genre a generation later as embattled teacher Jim McAllister, who finds himself caught in her crosshairs when he decides that he'll help loveable, dim jock (Chris Klein's Paul) run against her. Payne isn't afraid to go dark with his work (see also: Citizen Ruth), and Election certainly falls into that category, eschewing slapstick antics for scathing insight.Read The Empire Review

Some 13 years before Clueless, Amy Heckerling made her directorial debut, an adaptation of Cameron Crowe's book in which the 22-year-old writer moved back in with his parents and enrolled in Claremont High School as student Dave Cameron (no, not that one). Like Crowe's novel, the film ignores the undercover aspect and creates a believable unpolished mosaic of teen life that manages to be by turns raw and brazen, then sensitively observed and authentic. It also has one of the greatest teen movies cast lists, providing a launch pad for Jennifer Jason Leigh (who memorably fellates a carrot), Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Forrest Whitaker, Anthony Edwards, Nicolas Cage (credited as Nicholas Coppola), and most memorably Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli – the eternally stoned surfer dude constantly butting heads with strict history teacher Mr. Hands (Ray Walston). Read The Empire Review

Scream is usually – rightfully – lauded for its knowing disassembly of horror tropes, but it's also a killer teen flick, an element baked into its meta-approach since so many slasher films prey on the young. Director Wes Craven worked alongside writer Kevin Williamson, who would go on to create one of the key teen dramas of the late 1990s in Dawson's Creek. His self-aware style is on full display here: Scream's young would-be victims are either knowing consumers of scare fodder or the sort of archetypes you tend to find being stalked. And what a cast – from Neve Campbell, to Drew Barrymore (bumped off shockingly early), to Skeet Ulrich and Rose McGowan. The blood flows freely, but the wit and winks keep you hooked in a way that a flat-out parody never could. Looking at you, Not Another Teen Movie.Read The Empire Review

If every film on this list deals with adolescence, only one film played a major role in defining the very notion of the teenager itself. James Dean's Jim Stark is the moody teen personified, sporting cinema's coolest jacket (sorry Indy and Tyler Durden) and displaying all the restlessness and rage in the world with little ability to articulate it. Moved from town to town with his parents due to bad behaviour, Stark arrives in LA and is drawn to Judy (Natalie Wood), the girlfriend of local bad boy Buzz (Corey Allen). All roads lead to a switchblade fight (cut from the UK release) and then the famous game of chicken as Stark and Buzz race to the edge of a cliff, with whoever dives out first losing. From this vantage point, it's impossible to calculate the impact Dean's performance must have had on young audiences, but his performance remains magnetic, brooding, sexual, mannered, ambiguous. Generation gaps have rarely been so vividly drawn as when Stark screams to his parents, "You're tearing me apart!"Read The Empire Review

Few films so successfully capture the sheer awkwardness and anxiety of becoming a teenager as Bo Burnham's directorial feature debut. Elsie Fisher is both completely loveable and totally heartbreaking as middle-schooler Kayla, lacking in confidence and nearly physically buckling under the weight of her emotions as she tries to navigate her final week of eighth grade. Burnham's screenplay is especially astute in capturing what it is to be a teen in the internet age – vlogging, social media and smartphones are a near-constant presence, offering both social acceptance and impossible expectations. Where most teen movies portray a glossy or idealised version of the teenage experience, the sweet and delicate Eighth Grade feels none-more-real – right down to Anna Meredith's panic-attack soundtrack and Josh Hamilton's deeply empathetic performance as Kayla's dad who just can't seem to do anything right.Read The Empire Review

It's impossible to over-estimate the ways American Graffiti has shaped the teen movie landscape. From the idea of following four friends — the straight-edge (Ron Howard), the cynic (Richard Dreyfuss), the jock (Paul Le Mat), and the nerd (Charlie Martin Smith) — over one endless summer night, to its cavalcade of '50s hits (note: there's no Elvis, too expensive), to the title-card at the end detailing the protagonists' fates, George Lucas's second, most human film set the template for so much that followed. But more than that, it's just a peach of a picture, an insightful, affectionate love letter to cars, music, chasing girls, illicit drinking, flouting the law and the poignancy of leaving home. All that, and Harrison Ford in a cowboy hat singing 'Some Enchanted Evening.' In words of the characters, it's just bitchin'. Read The Empire Review

Grease is an easy target as the archetypal Actors Playing Teenagers Who Were Way Too Old To Play Teenagers flick (for the record, John Travolta was 23, Olivia Newton John turned 29, and Stockard Channing was 33). But Randall Kleiser's throwback to a certain kind of '50s youth-a-palooza does so much right. It's a simple plot — bad boy Danny Zuko (Travolta, piping hot after Saturday Night Fever) is too ashamed to date good girl Sandy Olsen (Newton John) until he isn't — but laced with laughs, energy and great songs. From the synchronous singalong of 'Summer Nights' to the auto-erotic dancing of 'Greased Lightning' to the exuberant funfair pas de deux of 'You're The One That I Want' ("ooh, ooh, ooh, honey"), it has choons to rival Hamilton, plus a firm grasp on the touchstones of adolescence; the thrill of friendships, the embarrassment of rejection ('What will they say Monday at school?"), the need for speed, and that uneasy universal feeling when you wear a sensible cardigan and your crush turns up in tight leather with a perm. Let's be honest, we've all been there. Read The Empire Review

Perhaps the quintessential teen sex-com, Paul and Chris Weitz delivered a Porky's for the late '90s as a group of high school guys – led by Jason Biggs' not-exactly-nerdy-but-not-exactly-cool Jim – plan to lose their virginity before college. But it's not just the men – elsewhere including Seann William Scott's scene-stealing asshole Stifler, Chris Klein's jock Oz, Thomas Ian Nicholas' inexperienced Kevin, and Eddie Kaye Thomas' neurotic Finch – who get to explore their sexuality. As it turns out, Natasha Lyonne's Jessica and Alyson Hannigan's (this one time at) band camp nerd Michelle are even more knowledgeable than the guys. Despite the testosterone-fuelled premise, the resolution is ultimately sweet – though there are plenty of gross-out exploits (premature ejaculation, explosive diarrhoea, and, most famously, pie-sex) en route.Read The Empire Review

A key part of teenagedom is a burning desire to leave your hometown firmly in the rearview and get away from your parents – only to near-immediately appreciate your youth more than you ever did. It's an experience exquisitely captured in Greta Gerwig's spiky but emotionally-astute coming-of-age flick, a paean to her own home city of Sacramento. Saoirse Ronan is Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson (her given name "given to me, by me") desperate to get out of her Catholic school and venture to the East Coast ("where culture is!"), along the way losing her virginity to a pretentious literature-bro (Timothée Chalamet) and falling out with her best friend (Beanie Feldstein). But the heart of Lady Bird is the real lack of actual incident in a lot of teenage lives ("I wish I could live through something," she laments), and the fractious mother-daughter relationship that's so much bigger than it appears in the moment. For all the snappy dialogue, Gerwig's film has a big, beautiful heart.Read The Empire Review

Olivia Wilde's directorial debut celebrates teenage friendship in a whole new light. Booksmart follows best friends Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), two over-achieving students who realise that they only have one night left to make up for years spent studying instead of living it up. What ensues is a euphoric adventure in a race against the clock full of parties, promises and pitch-perfect karaoke renditions. Wilde directs the film with a playfulness that is felt in a soundtrack full of bangers (Lizzo! Perfume Genius! LCD Soundsystem!) and production design that understands just how crucial a teenage girl's wardrobe and bedroom can be. Her characters, too, are quietly revolutionary – the fact that Amy is queer is essential, but not the only plot point that matters. Inclusive, open-hearted and bursting with energy: it's outstanding. Read The Empire Review

Perhaps the outright coolest teen movie ever made, The Lost Boys didn't actually start out as a teen film. But director Joel Schumacher soon changed that when he took over the project from producer Richard Donner. Originally, the vampire clan and their hunters were younger, but that didn't appeal to Schumacher, who wanted the film to be "raging with hormones". Sam and The Frog Brothers, meanwhile, are us – they've soaked up pop culture, emboldened by their comic-book and cinema heroes, and are ready to take on the world, as we all are before reality bites and we become jaded husks. Schumacher saw vampires as an oral sex metaphor, and The Lost Boys is certainly an adolescence allegory – it's about wanting to be the best versions of ourselves, of beating the bullies, of saving the day – and feeling as immortal as it gets. Never die.Read The Empire Review

No film has so effectively portrayed the sheer hell of being a teenager like Brian De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's classic debut novel. Day in day out, Sissy Spacek's titular outcast has to face the school bullies who ridicule her and the abusive religious fervour of her God-fearing mother – until a truly nasty prank at the prom pushes her well and truly over the edge. The result is a swirling cocktail of blood, telekinesis, and righteous female fury, the visceral changes of puberty taking an all-new supernatural turn. And if Carrie's actions in the fiery finale aren't exactly laudable, Spacek's performance endears real sympathy for a horror character who only becomes arguable monstrous because the world proves so ceaselessly cruel to her (and what could be more teenage than that feeling?) Carrie took the burgeoning teen film genre and doused it in a bucket of blood.Read The Empire Review

Richard Linklater's freewheeling, feel-good day-in-the-life story is one of the greatest movies ever made in which ostensibly nothing happens. Drawing on the filmmaker's own '70s youth in Texas – all hazing rituals, cruising in cars, moonlit keggers, and rock'n'roll riffs – Dazed And Confused is a pure snapshot in time. The day in question is 28 May 1976 – the last day of school, where soon-to-be-senior Randall 'Pink' Floyd (Jason London) refuses to sign an anti-drug policy for the high school football team, and soon-to-be-freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) has the coolest night of his life while avoiding the beatings of Ben Affleck's bully Fred O'Bannion. It's a simple framework for youthful cinematic joy, these loveable teens – the stellar ensemble also featuring Milla Jovovich, Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams, and Matthew McConaughey – simply hanging out, staying up all night, drinking and smoking to a thumping soundtrack of '70s hard rock. Sweet emotion, indeed.Read The Empire Review

Every teenager has dreamed of ditching school to embark on the ultimate skive day, but few have dreamed big enough to do it quite like Ferris Bueller. Matthew Broderick's defining role a smooth, super slick skivemeister, whose verbal jujitsu can extricate him from almost any situation. He's also smug, superior, and almost entirely insufferable — our eternal sypathies to long-suffereing sister Jean "Shauna" Bueller. But despite all that, Ferris is impossible not to root for — he is, as the sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies and dickheads will attest, a righteous dude. John Hughes' fourth film is part deep dive into teenage fantasy, part love-letter to Chicago, as Sloane (Mia Sara), Cameron (Alan Ruck) and Ferris spend their stolen day sightseeing in a stolen Ferrari, tearing it up on a parade float and masquerading as the city's sausage king. It's the movie Hughes is most famous for and a gloriously bold, fourth-wall-breaking paean to the art of slacking off. Leisure rules. Read The Empire Review

Nearly a decade after Clueless came its natural successor – another super-slick, super-funny, uber-quotable teen classic. Lindsay Lohan's Cady is the formerly home-schooled normal kid who joins an American high school when her parents move the family back from Africa, and despite quickly making friends with outcasts Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese), she's literally invited to the table of the Plastics – North Shore High royalty, led by the "fabulous but evil" Regina George (Rachel McAdams). Cue a plot to take the Plastics down from the inside in a film about friendship, shaming, and high school hierarchies. If it's ultimately about kindness, Mean Girls still revels in the antics of its, well, mean girls – and the stellar cast is gifted a genius script from Tina Fey, every scene a knockout, every other line a total classic. So fetch!Read The Empire Review

"There's a difference between like and love. Because I like my Sketchers, but I love my Prada backpack." If Shakespeare himself wrote teen comedies, he couldn't come up with lines this good – but screenwriters Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith managed it in their '90s redo of The Taming Of The Shrew. Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynick) is the rich popular girl who's only allowed to date when her "heinous witch" of an older sister Kat (a brilliant Julia Stiles) does too – leading to a scheme in which bad-boy Patrick (a swoonsome Heath Ledger) is paid to woo the elder sibling. What are the chances of them actually falling for each other? Beyond its snappy dialogue, it boasts brilliant performances – especially from Ledger, who gets to deliver one of the all-time-great romantic gestures on screen in the iconic marching band sequence – and a pitch-perfect pop-punk soundtrack led by Letters To Cleo.Read The Empire Review

It's easy to think of Back To The Future as anything but a teen movie. It's a time travel movie. A sci-fi adventure. A fish out of water story. A comedy about the perils of fancying your mum. And, perhaps it's because his main relationship is a friendship with an eccentric old scientist, but it's easy to overlook the fact that Marty McFly is a 17 year-old kid. But he is, undeniably, and so is Back To The Future a teen movie. Marty may seem more of an adult at times — he's self-possessed, resourceful, and quick with a quip, but he is, at his core, a hormonal kid whose biggest goals in life, when the movie starts, are to rock hard, skateboard harder, and steal away with his girlfriend for an illicit weekend. The teenage side of Marty (who, lest we forget, remains 17 all the way through the trilogy) comes to the fore in his impetuosity; that quickness of temper; the arrogance. And, when Robert Zemeckis allows him to hang out with kids his own age — the relentlessly horny Lorraine, and the painfully awkward George — the film's teen movie roots are undeniable. It was still a heck of a gamble back in the mid-80s but, as it turned out, not only were audiences ready for it, but their kids were gonna love it too.Read The Empire Review

Right from its opening image of a lyric from David Bowie's 'Changes' shattering into fragments, the quintessential John Hughes movie sets about breaking down barriers. The Breakfast Club isn't just a film for teens or about teens – it's one that speaks directly to teens about the invisible rules that seem to govern their world, that don't really exist. Bender (Judd Nelson), Claire (Molly Ringwald), Andrew (Emilio Estevez), Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) and Allison (Ally Sheedy) are the embodiments of separate high school subsets, respectively the criminal, princess, athlete, brain, and basket case, all stuck together on a Saturday morning detention. Over the course of the day – via rule-breaking, weed-smoking, and some egregious makeovers – they come to realise that they're not so different. In so many ways, The Breakfast Club is a product of its time, and so the specificities don't exactly match up today. But the key to its continued relevance is in that iconic letter sign-off: 'Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club'. It's the sheer sincerity, the attempt to understand and relate to complex teenage lives that endures. That, and Simple Minds' incredible synth hit 'Don't You (Forget About Me)' – as if we ever could.Read The Empire Review

Could anything else really be at the #1 spot? Ugh, as if! There's not a hair, nor a needle-drop, nor a yellow plaid skirt-suit out of place in Amy Heckerling's genius teen flick – still the best movie adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma out there. Instead of Emma Woodhouse, we have Cher Horowitz – Alicia Silverstone perfectly cast as the meddling but well-meaning Beverly Hills rich girl whose attempts to manipulate romantic entanglements for the relationship-challenged go awry. Along the way she helps gawky new girl Tai (a wide-eyed Brittany Murphy) to level up, and falls for her step-brother Josh – a crush that would raise eyebrows if it weren't for him being played by the ageless being known here on Earth as Paul Rudd. From the way it looks (the outrageously '90s outfits play a huge role), to the way it sounds (the teen-speak, like, totally influenced so much actual teen-speak), to the way it feels (its evocation of the Beverly Hills teen elite is everything), Heckerling gets it all spot on, drawing brilliant performances from her entire cast, elsewhere featuring Stacey Dash, Donald Faison, Breckin Meyer, and Wallace Shawn. And for all that Cher is beautiful, popular, privileged beyond belief, and always meddling with other people's lives, Silverstone makes her immensely likeable – now and forever, the ultimate teen queen.Read The Empire Review