The 35 greatest teen movies ever made

Though it’s been around as a film genre since the early Fifties, the teen movie just doesn’t get old. Films about youthful rebellion and sexual awakening are fascinating whatever your age – and below are 35 of our critics' favourites.

They’re drawn from across various eras and cultures, but all of them brilliantly describe that vertiginous lurch we feel when we find ourselves teetering on the brink of adulthood. “Life moves pretty fast,” a wise man once said: “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” That’s exactly what the best films allow us to do. 

1. The Wild One (1953)

Teenage rebellion could be seen in cinemas long before the idea of the teenager had really taken shape: as early as 1937, William Wyler’s Dead End showed New York slum kids railing against their older, richer neighbours. But it took Marlon Brando straddling a 6T Triumph Thunderbird to give teen rebelliousness its first icon. 

Brando was 29 years old when he starred in Laslo Benedek’s biker drama, but he came to embody the cool disaffectedness of this new emerging social group. When a girl asked Johnny Strabler what he was rebelling against, his answer – “Whaddaya got?” – went down in film history. That question became the keystone of every great teen movie since. 

2. Summer with Monika (1953)

America supplied the violence, but Europe brought the sex. In Ingmar Bergman’s charged drama, two teenagers abscond on a boat and drift around Sweden’s Baltic coast, until autumn and adulthood call. The film’s sexual frankness, including a scene in which the actress Harriet Andersson clambers naked across a rocky shore, made it a sizeable word-of-mouth hit.

3. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

The early death of its star, James Dean, secured instant-legend status for Nicholas Ray’s brooding melodrama, in which Jim Stark, the new boy at Dawson High School, clashes with bullies, turns on his parents, and tries to build a new family from friendship.  When Rebel Without a Cause was released in the United States, Dean had died less than a month previously, and Elvis Presley’s first sessions with RCA in Nashville were only six months away. The film appeared at a fold in American history, with the cult of the teenager writ large on the pages ahead.

4. Cruel Story of Youth (AKA Naked Youth) (1960)

On the other side of the world, things weren’t so different. Japan’s teen movies described the hormone-addled rise of that country’s own youth, who’d been stung by the recent Allied occupation and were hungry for freedoms of every type. In 1960, Nagisa Oshima shocked international audiences with this sexually charged drama slathered in French New Wave cool, about a high-school girl (Miyuki Kuwano) who falls into an intense relationship with a rebellious student.

5. Il Posto (1961)

Meanwhile, in Italy: Domenico, a 19-year-old from rural Lombardy, comes to Milan to find work as an office messenger, although the pressures and routines of adulthood soon start to grind him down. Unlike America and Japan’s teenage mythmaking, Ermanno Olmi’s film was scrupulously grounded in the real world: this was the teen movie via neorealism – tender, smart and bleakly beautiful.

6. A Hard Day's Night (1964)

The first of The Beatles’ five films, and their best by far, A Hard Day's Night caught hold of the sparky exuberance of teen culture: it’s the first title on this list in which being a teenager looks straightforwardly fun. Richard Lester’s film swerved between documentary, rock musical and surreal comedy – but when you’re young and free, why tie yourself down?

7. Murmur of the Heart (1971)

Being a 14-year-old boy in France of the early Seventies was a heck of a ride: it meant brothels, cigars, brandy, jazz and Proust, if Louis Malle’s coming-of-age tale, made in the wake of the New Wave, is anything to go by. (And you really hope it is.) A scene of maternal incest made the film controversial on release, but audiences bracing for scandal were surprised by its lightness and subtlety.

8. American Graffiti (1973)

George Lucas’s second feature was a Kennedy film for a Nixon crowd. Set in 1962, it commemorated, and celebrated, a time to be young that had already passed – before rioting, assassinations and ground war in Vietnam took their toll on the American psyche. It’s simple stuff: the adventures of four teenage friends during one summer night. Time for fun is short, but they, and the world, don’t know it yet.

9. Quadrophenia (1979)

Franc Roddam’s glowering Mod drama, freely adapted from The Who’s rock opera, is about the illusion of invincibility: the sense of strength that flows through you when you’re young and part of the right crowd; wearing the right clothes, thinking the right thoughts, revving the right Vespa. The scene is unmistakably London and Brighton, 1964, but the needs and fears the film gives voice to feel startlingly true even now.

10. Gregory's Girl (1981)

Bill Forsyth’s irresistible comic romance, set mostly in a secondary school just outside Glasgow, appears slight at first, but there’s a bone-deep awareness of the agonies and joys of teenage life here, and the comedy, though gentle, is alpine-crisp. John Gordon Sinclair’s storkish physique is teen awkwardness given form, and you cringe along with every stumble and flub.

11. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

The early Eighties was when Hollywood really seized on the teen movie as a marketable commodity, and Amy Heckerling’s film, adapted by Cameron Crowe from his own book, is the smartest and sharpest of the era. At the time, critics despaired at its earthy humour and unglamorous sex, but the film had a chord-striking honesty that couldn’t be found in Porky’s and its imitators, and Crowe’s dialogue snaps like mousetraps.

12. Pauline at the Beach (1983)

It’s hard to think of a director whose teenage characters are blessed with more early-blossoming wisdom than éric Rohmer. In the third film from his Comedies and Proverbs series, 15-year-old Pauline (Amanda Langlet) passes the summer at a small town on the coast, discovering love while watching the intricate farce of her elders’ romantic lives unravel.

13. The Breakfast Club (1985)

How on earth do you choose just a single John Hughes film to put on a list like this? The answer is you don’t, so here’s the first of two: the writer-director’s inspired 1985 chamber-piece, in which five apparent stock-character teens – a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal, as they’re introduced to us – discover there’s more to being young than living up to the role with which you’ve been labelled.

14. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Every word of The Breakfast Club rang, and still rings, heart-twistingly true. But a year later, Hughes showed he could make a fantasy story seem every bit as plausible. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is set over a day of virtuoso high-school truancy, involving a stolen Ferrari, a parade, a haute cuisine lunch and a baseball game. But underpinning the craziness is a sense of the bittersweet quickness of teenage life – Ferris reminds us these days don’t just have to be endured, but seized.

15. Heathers (1988)

The enduring popularity of Heathers is clear – thirty years after its release the cult classic has just opened as a West End musical and is set to be one of the most popular shows of the Autumn – but what makes the cult film (which stars Winona Ryder and Christian Slater) so brilliant? Largely it's the fact that Lehmann went against the grain and skewered the saccharine portrayal of adolescence that had dominated the Eighties, with John Hughes’s pastel-hued confections. In Heathers, parents were no longer well-meaning and earnest, but stupidly naive; heroines weren’t perky but dangerous, and gruesome violence wasn't a unthinkable thought, but a central narrative. Heathers was living proof that teen film didn't need to be sickly sweet, they could be bad in their own right. 

16. Boyz n the Hood (1991)

In the South Central Los Angeles of John Singleton’s blistering debut feature, coming of age isn’t a given. Three teenage boys plan their futures while doing their best to survive in the present: their choices could lead them to college, via a sports scholarship, or a life of street hustling, or a fast and brutal end. Family bonds strain and loyalties are tested. It’s a landmark of American cinema: young voices, long-ignored, were suddenly speaking out.

17. Dazed and Confused (1993)

It’s 1976 in Austin, Texas, on the last day of school, although the future seems a lifetime away. Richard Linklater’s film is about preserving a moment in time, even if what happens in that moment is almightily inconsequential: parties, pranks, twiddly vignettes of romance and friendship. The film flows as naturally as life, and every second rings slyly true.

18. Clueless (1995)

Amy Heckerling again, who relocated from Ridgemont High to Beverly Hills for this fizzy satire loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma, in which 15-year-old queen bee Cher (Alicia Silverstone) gets a taste for good deeds after engineering a romance between two teachers. Like Ridgemont, Clueless helped to jump-start a golden age of American teen movies, and beneath its fluffy, fashion-crazed surface, there’s needle-sharp wit.

19. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

Another teen reimagining of a literary classic; this time, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, relocated to Padua High School, where Julia Stiles’s proud outsider is wooed by Heath Ledger’s hunky scruff. The title change is significant: Stiles doesn’t play a shrew but an unabashed feminist, who reads The Bell Jar at home to counteract the “oppressive patriarchal values of the classroom”. Even 19 years later, she’s almost alone in the genre.

20. Election (1999)

It’s difficult not to see parallels between Election and recent modern political discourse, as evidenced by the sheer volume of think pieces that have compared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Reese Witherspoon’s fiercely ambitious, hyper-prepared and ruthless high school politician Tracy Flick. Former teen movie star Matthew Broderick shines as the in-over-his-head teacher working the school elections, and it’s Witherspoon’s greatest performance – a keenly observed, brilliantly dark starring role that has come to define and exemplify a specific, polarising kind of real-life personality.

21. The Virgin Suicides (1999)

The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola's adaption of Jeffrey Eugenident's novel about five beautiful, blonde teenage sisters who inexplicably commit suicide, is a mordant tale of fear, anxiety and nostalgic longing in affluent Seventies suburbia. It's told from the point of view of other teenage boys in the area fascinated by the reclusive and isolated girls, who are kept under tight scrutiny by their parents. It marks the beginning of Coppola and Kirsten Dunst's long-term working partnership in Marie Antoinette (2006), The Bling Ring (2013) and The Beguiled (2017). 

22. Battle Royale (2000)

The success of the Hunger Games films, The Maze Runner and even the inferior Divergent, teen films have been branching out into bolder, dystopian territory for some time, but the move was anticipated by Kinji Fukasaku’s astonishing, blood-dark satire in which schoolchildren are shanghaied into a state-sponsored fight to the death. Crazy and provocative, yet totally morally serious; it’s hard to imagine Fukasaku’s last film ever being drained of its power to shock. 

23. Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

One of the greatest teen films, sure – and unquestionably the sexiest. In Alfonso Cuarón’s road movie, two 17-year-old chums and a glamorous older woman drive across Mexico in search of a perfect beach; mostly, she’s in the driving seat, in every sense. A voice-over weaves in grim observations about the country’s present state, adding melancholic bite. The film considers death, but shivers with life. It’s young.

24. Mean Girls (2004)

In the years that followed this film, the smart American teen movie made a comeback, with Drew Barrymore’s Whip It and Will Gluck’s Easy A moving the genre in a direction of which you suspect Kat Stratford would approve. But both of those films felt possible thanks to Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan, in which a home-educated ingénue plunges into the high-school jungle. It’s funny, wise, endlessly quotable and so well observed it stings.

25. Juno (2007)

Jason Reitman's debut feature film is brilliantly touching; evoking laughter, tears and beams from ear-to-ear thanks to the work of an all-star ensemble (Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Alison Janney, etc) and a script that strikes the perfect balance between emotionally charged and genuinely hilarious. This comic drama's brutally frank outlook on the controversial realities of teen pregnancies made it a cultural landmark and a film that will be celebrated for decades to come. 

26. An Education (2009)

The Lolita narrative is hardy new, but Lone Scherfig's drama made it feel remarkably fresh.  In this adaptation of Lynn Barber's memoir, Peter Sarsgaard stars as the sauve Sixties gentlemen who swoops Oxford-bound schoolgirl Carey Mulligan and her parents off their feet. But surprisingly what follows is not a tale of love against the odds, but rather a heartbreak and deceit that depicts the fleeting and impressionable passions of teenage infatuation. 

27. Easy A (2010)

Will Gluck's film was one of few teenage comedy flicks in the wake of Mean Girls that actually stood its ground. This modern, hilarious adolescent twist on the Scarlet Letter is brilliant, matter-of-fact and hyper-critcal of the social pressures placed on teens. That's before pointing out that Emma Stone's performance as faux-promiscuous outcast Olive is easily one of her greatest. 

28. Whip It! (2010)

Drew Barrymore's directorial debut may not be the most original film in the genre, it is impossible to dislike. Ellen Page stars as Bliss,  a speccy kid who likes listening to music on vinyl, dying her hair blue and disappointing her beauty pageant-obsessed mother. One day she spots a bunch of roller-girls and soon she’s sneaking off from her parents and spending her evenings with a motley bunch of fabulously named girls: Bloody Holly (Zoe Bell), Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Rosa Sparks (Eve), Smashley Simpson (Barrymore herself). They're members of the all-whooping, game-losing Hurl Scouts roller-derby team who take Bliss on a heartfelt journey of adolescent self-discovery.  

29. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

Imagine if Wes Anderson and the writers from (500) Days of Summer realigned the teen tear-jerker The Fault in Our Stars for art-house movie fetishists. Enter director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's debut feature, adapted by Jesse Andrew from his own best-selling Young Adult novel. Telling the story of three high-school misfits growing up and facing death in middle-class Pittsburgh, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has arch, winsome and kooky written all over it in Helvetica font.  It may all sound twee on paper, but the film is thoughtful, tender and bursting with mordant humour. 

30. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

This indie coming-of-age drama is witty and overtly, unashamedly crude in its discussion of sex. The film's appeal doesn't just lie in its brilliant cast, with Bel Powley establishing her talent as the teenage mistress of her mother (Kristen Wiig)'s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsg?rd).  Marielle Heller may direct a picture that is graphically sexual, foul-mouthed and shocking – but in doing so she's also captured the inner workings of the sexually curious mind of a teenage girl.

31. The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

Kelly Fremon Craig's directorial debut is just reminiscent enough of John Hughes' efforts to be a joy rather than an embarrassing tribute. The performances alone make Edge of Seventeen worthwhile, with Hailee Steinfeld giving a career-best performance as heroine Nadine, and Woody Harrelson shining as her fed-up teacher.

32. Moonlight (2016)

It may not slot easily into the teen film category, but Moonlight still deserves recognition for challenging convention with a riveting depiction of adolescence. Barry Jenkins' visual feast was the deserved winner of the 2017 Oscar for Best Picture and is an emotionally charged exploration of a young African-American boy's upbringing grappling his mother's addiction, poverty and his own homosexuality. 

33. Lady Bird (2017)

Greta Gerwig wrote and directed this coming-of-age comedy, basing it on her own memories as a Catholic schoolgirl growing up in Sacramento at the turn of the century. Saoirse Ronan, playing a teenage version of her director, is 17 years old at the start of the film and has started dubbing herself Lady Bird, abandoning Christine, the name given to her by her parents. She’s on the point of applying to college, which she wants to be as far away from Sacramento and her oversolicitous mother as geographically possible: ideally New York, which she idolises, in a Manhattan-ish way, right out of proportion. From the start, it’s the mother-daughter relationship to which Gerwig pays most attention of all, and while it is of course a beautiful testament to self-discovery, this film is about a nest, every twig that was used to build it, and what flying out of it might mean and cost, to parents and child alike.

34. Love, Simon (2018)

The beauty of Love, Simon, the first mainstream teen comedy about coming out, is that it really doesn't need to dwell on the fact that its protagonist Simon (Nick Robinson) is gay.  Instead it aims to conform to every contour of the high school romcom landscape, complete with secrets, gossip, unrequited crushes and an indie-pop soundtrack. Sweet and moving as it often manages to be, the film is comfortingly average – existing not to stand out, but fit in. A true reflection of how progressive and accepting society can be at its best. 

35. To All the Boys I've Loved Before (2018)

Another teen film riding the wave of progression, and seeking to represent a lived experience that is rarely centre stage (that of young Asian girls) is Netflix's To All the Boys I've Loved Before. The streaming site's far superior alternative to cult hit The Kissing Booth is one of the first teen movies to cast an Asian actress (Lana Condor) as its main character.