From American Pie to The Perks of Being a Wallflower — the Definitive list of High School movies that actually stick.
There’s a reason Hollywood has been making high school movies since before any of us were born, and it isn’t just because teenagers buy a lot of cinema tickets. It’s because high school is, for most people, the last place where every single thing feels completely, cosmically important — where a rumour can end your social life, a bet can become a love story, and attending a party can feel like crossing a threshold between who you were and who you’re going to be.
Whether you’re looking for something to wallow in on a rainy Sunday or something to put on for a group that can’t agree on anything, this list covers the full spectrum: filthy sex comedies, devastating coming-of-age dramas, breezy rom-coms, witch covens, zombie outbreaks, and a body swap that changed Lindsay Lohan’s career trajectory forever.
Let’s get stuck in.
1. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
Director: Gil Junger | Cast: Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, Andrew Keegan
If you’ve never seen 10 Things I Hate About You, you have been doing Fridays wrong your entire adult life. This is Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew relocated to a Seattle high school, and the film is smart enough to know that the story’s most interesting character is Kat — the furious, sardonic older sister who has decided she doesn’t need anyone — rather than the wide-eyed kid trying to date her more agreeable sibling.
Heath Ledger, in what was essentially his breakthrough role, is operating at a level of charisma that shouldn’t be legal for someone that young. His rendition of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” on the stadium bleachers remains one of the most genuinely charming scenes in the entire genre. Julia Stiles matches him beat for beat. The soundtrack is period-perfect. The ending poem still holds. A genuine all-timer.
2. Easy A (2010)
Director: Will Gluck | Cast: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci
Emma Stone built her entire A-list career on the back of this film, and it is completely deserved. Easy A is a high school comedy that is sharper and smarter than it has any right to be — a riff on The Scarlet Letter in which a girl’s invented sexual reputation becomes both her social currency and her undoing, with Stone playing the whole thing as a kind of satirical one-woman show delivered directly to the audience.
The cast supporting her is absurdly stacked. Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as the hip, hilariously supportive parents are worth the watch alone. And Thomas Haden Church’s English teacher, who clearly sees exactly what’s happening, brings just enough melancholy to stop the film from being too breezy. This is a comedy with a real argument underneath it, about reputation, performance, and the way high school turns everyone into an audience. One of the best comedies of its decade.
3. Eighth Grade (2018)
Director: Bo Burnham | Cast: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson
Here’s one that will make you feel things in your chest cavity. Bo Burnham — who spent his own adolescence on YouTube and grew up in the very specific glare of the internet — made a film about the last week of eighth grade for a quiet, anxious 13-year-old named Kayla, and it is one of the most accurate depictions of what being a teenager right now actually feels like.
Elsie Fisher is extraordinary. The scene where she sits in the backseat of her dad’s car and cries while he tries to tell her he’s proud of her is the kind of thing that sneaks up and breaks your heart before you know what’s happening. Eighth Grade is technically a middle-school movie rather than a high-school movie, but Kayla’s terrified anticipation of the transition is so central to the film that it absolutely earns its place on this list. An uncomfortable, necessary, quietly brilliant film.
4. Fired Up! (2009)
Director: Will Gluck | Cast: Nicholas D’Agosto, Eric Christian Olsen, Sarah Roemer, Molly Sims, AnnaLynne McCord
Look, nobody is putting Fired Up! on a list of Important Cinema. But nobody is turning it off, either. Two arrogant high school footballers ditch training camp to attend a cheerleading camp because the ratio of women to men is roughly 300-to-2, and what follows is a cheerleading comedy that is considerably funnier and more self-aware than it has any business being.
The script is genuinely witty — full of Bring It On in-jokes and a kind of cheerful self-deprecation that keeps the whole thing from feeling mean. D’Agosto and Olsen have legitimate comic chemistry. And for a film that is essentially a feature-length excuse for the premise “football guys want to hook up with cheerleaders,” it manages to earn its predictable but satisfying ending. A guilty pleasure that isn’t all that guilty once you’re actually watching it.
5. Mean Girls (2004)
Director: Mark Waters | Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried
Written by Tina Fey, Mean Girls is based on Rosalind Wiseman’s non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, Mean Girls is one of the handful of teen comedies that genuinely crossed over into the cultural vocabulary. If you’ve ever said “she doesn’t even go here,” “on Wednesdays we wear pink,” or “the limit does not exist,” you have Mean Girls to thank for that.
What makes it work beyond the quotability is Rachel McAdams as Regina George — a villain who is so precisely observed that she’s become the template for every mean-girl character written since. Lohan is excellent in her pre-tabloid-era prime, and Fey’s script is merciless about the specific cruelties of female social hierarchies in a way that didn’t feel dated five years later and somehow still doesn’t today. Required viewing.
6. Porky’s (1981)
Director: Bob Clark | Cast: Dan Monahan, Mark Herrier, Wyatt Knight, Kim Cattrall, Scott Colomby
Porky’s is ground zero for the entire teen sex comedy genre — the film that proved you could build a successful studio movie entirely around a group of Florida high school boys trying to lose their virginity, with the majority of the humour arriving via a notorious roadhouse strip club and the various disasters that unfold around it.
By contemporary standards, quite a bit of Porky’s is deeply uncomfortable, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise. But as a historical artefact of what mainstream comedy looked like in 1981 — and as the direct ancestor of American Pie, Superbad, and everything that followed — it’s essential viewing for anyone interested in how the genre got started. Bob Clark, who also made A Christmas Story two years later, remains one of cinema’s more baffling chameleons.
7. The Basketball Diaries (1995)
Director: Scott Kalvert | Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Lorraine Bracco, Ernie Hudson
Before Leonardo DiCaprio was winning Oscars and dodging supermodels on yachts, he was starring in films like The Basketball Diaries — an adaptation of poet Jim Carroll’s autobiographical journals about his descent from Catholic school basketball star to heroin addict on the streets of New York City.
It is not a comfortable watch. DiCaprio commits completely and the film does not look away from the ugliness of addiction in the way that a glossier production might. Mark Wahlberg is here too, in one of his early dramatic roles, and the friendship between the two characters gives the wreckage something to anchor to. This is the film that proved DiCaprio was genuinely operating at a different level from his Growing Pains days, and it holds up as a brutal, unsentimental piece of work.
8. Accepted (2006)
Director: Steve Pink | Cast: Justin Long, Blake Lively, Jonah Hill, Lewis Black, Anthony Heald
A film for anyone who has ever looked at the college admissions process and thought: what if we just didn’t? Accepted follows a group of newly graduated high schoolers who, having failed to get into any actual university, fake a college instead — complete with a website, a former psychiatric hospital as a campus, and an admissions policy of “sure, come along.”
What starts as a fairly standard teen comedy gradually becomes something slightly more interesting: a genuine argument about the purpose of education, delivered via a school where students teach whatever they actually want to learn. Lewis Black as the alcoholic academic dragged into running the place is a perfect casting choice. Justin Long is reliably charming. And the film is smart enough to follow its own logic through to an ending that actually earns the sentiment it’s going for.
9. Can’t Buy Me Love (1987)
Director: Steve Rash | Cast: Patrick Dempsey, Amanda Peterson, Courtney Gains, Seth Green
The 80s high school movie template in its most pristine form. A nerdy kid (pre-Grey’s Anatomy Patrick Dempsey, absolutely dorky) pays the popular girl next door to pretend to be his girlfriend for a month so he can climb the social ladder, and the results are exactly as chaotic and quietly sweet as you’d expect.
Can’t Buy Me Love is warm in a way that a lot of its 80s contemporaries aren’t. Dempsey is genuinely likeable even when Ronald is being an idiot about his sudden popularity, and the film is honest about the fact that gaining social status by abandoning the people who actually knew you is a bad trade. Exactly the kind of film you want on a Saturday afternoon when you don’t want to think too hard about anything.
10. American Pie (1999)
Director: Paul Weitz | Cast: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Chris Klein, Mena Suvari, Tara Reid, Alyson Hannigan, Eugene Levy
American Pie is the defining teen sex comedy of the late 90s, and one of the films that genuinely changed what was considered acceptable on mainstream cinema screens. Four high school seniors make a pact to lose their virginity before graduation, and what follows is a comedy that is raunchier, funnier and — when it’s at its best — more unexpectedly sweet than its reputation suggests.
The genius of American Pie is that it actually likes its characters. These are not cool kids; they’re nervous, socially awkward, genuinely clueless teenagers who are trying to figure everything out at once, and the film treats their earnestness with genuine affection. Eugene Levy as the Dad Who Is Too Understanding is a running joke that somehow never stops landing. The film spawned an entire franchise but this original is the one — still sharper, still more honest than anything the sequels managed.
11. American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules (2020)
Director: Mike Elliott | Cast: Madison Pettis, Lizze Broadway, Piper Curda, Natasha Behnam, Darren Barnet
The American Pie franchise has been mining the Stifler family tree for direct-to-video spinoffs for two decades now, and Girls’ Rules is a fairly late entry — a standalone film that follows Stifler’s cousin Stephanie and her friends navigating prom, boys, and the usual high school chaos from a female perspective.
American Pie: Girls Rules is not reinventing anything. But as franchise extensions go, it’s a reasonably entertaining watch that has more energy than most of the other direct-to-video Pie entries, and it at least has the self-awareness to know exactly what genre it’s operating in. For completionists and franchise fans only, really — but it’s a harmless good time.
12. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997)
Director: David Mirkin | Cast: Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino, Janeane Garofalo, Alan Cumming, Julia Campbell
A film that is slightly too weird to be a mainstream comedy and slightly too mainstream to be a cult classic, which is exactly why it has quietly become one of the most beloved films of the 90s anyway. Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino play two best friends in their late twenties who have achieved precisely nothing of note and decide to show up at their ten-year high school reunion with completely fabricated careers.
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion is goofy and surreal in a way that shouldn’t work but absolutely does — there’s a fantasy sequence involving a fashion show that is completely inexplicable and utterly unforgettable. Kudrow in particular is operating on some other frequency, playing Romy’s cheerful obliviousness with a commitment that somehow keeps the character likeable right up until the film’s genuinely sweet final act. A film that holds up in a way that a lot of its contemporaries don’t.
13. Booksmart (2019)
Director: Olivia Wilde | Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jessica Williams, Billie Lourd, Will Forte, Jason Sudeikis
If Superbad is the definitive “last night of high school, chaos ensues” film for one kind of teenager, Booksmart is its answer — and it’s at least as good. Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein play Molly and Amy, two academically overachieving best friends who have spent four years doing everything right and, on the eve of graduation, realise that everyone else had fun and got into good universities. So they attempt to cram four years of fun into one night.
What makes Booksmart special is the specificity of its affection for its characters. Molly is obnoxious and brilliant in equal measure. Amy is kind and more nervous than she lets on. Their friendship feels completely real. And the party they end up at — which keeps transforming into something stranger and more unexpected as the night goes on — is a genuinely inventive piece of filmmaking. Olivia Wilde’s debut is one of the great high school movies.
14. Freaky Friday (2003)
Director: Mark Waters | Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mark Harmon, Chad Michael Murray, Harold Gould
Lindsay Lohan was 16 when this film came out and was already a more confident screen presence than actors twice her age. Jamie Lee Curtis was fully committed to playing a middle-aged therapist suddenly trapped in the body of a teenager and threw herself into the physical comedy with total abandon. The result is one of the most charming body-swap films ever made — which is saying something given how thoroughly the genre has been strip-mined.
The relationship between Anna and Tess works because both actresses are genuinely playing each other rather than just playing themselves. The scenes where they’re figuring out what the other person’s life actually feels like from the inside have a warmth that carries the whole film. Freaky Friday is genuinely fun for any age, and proof that “family comedy” doesn’t have to mean “comedy designed to make everyone mildly bored simultaneously.”
15. Pretty Persuasion (2005)
Director: Marcos Siega | Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Ron Livingston, Jane Krakowski, James Woods
One of the more genuinely uncomfortable films on this list — and one that probably couldn’t be made quite the same way today. Pretty Persuasion is a pitch-black satire following Kimberly, a 15-year-old student at an elite Beverly Hills academy, who convinces two friends to falsely accuse their English teacher of sexual assault. What follows is a media circus, a courtroom drama, and a film that is relentlessly unpleasant about basically everyone involved.
Evan Rachel Wood is electric in the lead — playing a character who is manipulative, intelligent, and deeply damaged — and the film is sharp enough to avoid simply condemning or excusing her. It’s a film that implicates everyone: the teacher (who isn’t entirely innocent), the parents, the media, the school, and yes, the audience for finding any of it entertaining. Not a comfortable watch. But a genuinely interesting one.
16. Bring It On (2000)
Director: Peyton Reed | Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union
Here’s the thing about Bring It On that people forget because the film is so cheerful: it has a genuinely thoughtful argument running underneath the pom-poms. A white suburban cheerleading squad realises their entire championship-winning routine was stolen from a historically Black squad at a less-funded school, and the film takes that seriously while still being a thoroughly enjoyable teen sports comedy.
Kirsten Dunst is excellent as Torrance, navigating the gap between wanting to win and knowing that winning on stolen material isn’t actually winning. Gabrielle Union’s Isis is the most magnetic presence in the film and the film knows it. The cheerleading sequences are legitimately impressive. Bring It On is a film that got dismissed as fluff on release and has only grown in critical reputation since. Give it the credit it deserves.
17. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
Director: Amy Heckerling | Cast: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Ray Walston
Cameron Crowe wrote the screenplay based on the year he spent undercover at a San Diego high school — attending as a student while being in his mid-twenties — and the authenticity of that research is all over the film. Fast Times at Ridgemont High doesn’t have a conventional plot so much as a collection of interconnected teenage lives, and the looseness of its structure is precisely what makes it feel real.
Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli — the perpetually stoned surfer who orders pizza delivered to Mr. Hand’s classroom — is one of the great comedy performances of the 1980s. But the film is also genuinely honest about harder things: Jennifer Jason Leigh’s storyline deals with teen pregnancy and abortion in a way that is remarkably unsentimentalised, even by today’s standards. A genuinely important film disguised as a teen comedy. Amy Heckerling deserves her flowers.
18. Disturbing Behaviour (1998)
Director: David Nutter | Cast: James Marsden, Katie Holmes, Nick Stahl, Bruce Greenwood
The late 90s were peak time for teens-in-peril genre films, and Disturbing Behaviour is a solid, under-seen entry — a psychological thriller in which a group of high school outcasts begin to suspect that their school’s suspiciously perfect “Blue Ribbon” students are the product of an elaborate mind-control experiment.
Marsden and Holmes are charismatic leads, Bruce Greenwood is reliably unsettling as the too-friendly school psychiatrist, and the film operates well in that particular late-90s register of teen horror that sits somewhere between John Hughes and David Cronenberg. Not a classic, but a genuinely effective thriller that rewards revisiting. Think of it as the scrappier, American cousin of The Faculty, made by people who were clearly having a good time.
19. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015)
Director: Christopher Landon | Cast: Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller, Joey Morgan, Sarah Dumont, David Koechner
A horror comedy that knows exactly what it is and executes it with gleeful enthusiasm. Three high school boy scouts — including one who is already embarrassed about still being a scout — find themselves at the epicentre of a zombie outbreak and have to apply their admittedly limited survival training to staying alive and rescuing the people they care about.
Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky) understands the mechanics of horror comedy better than almost anyone working in the genre right now, and Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse is an early example of his ability to balance actual scares with genuinely funny set pieces. The strip-club zombie sequence is one of the more inventive bits of horror comedy staging of the 2010s. Gross, funny, weirdly sweet at the edges.
20. Fish Tank (2009)
Director: Andrea Arnold | Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Rebecca Griffiths
Fish Tank is not a comfortable film. It follows Mia, a 15-year-old living on an East London council estate — volatile, isolated, recently expelled, spending her days practising hip-hop dance routines in an empty flat — and it doesn’t offer her much in the way of escape routes. The arrival of her mother’s new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender) gives her something to fixate on, and the film handles what develops between them with an unflinching honesty that is genuinely difficult to watch.
Andrea Arnold is one of the great British directors working today, and Fish Tank is her best film — a piece of work that refuses to explain its characters or soften their edges, trusting the audience to sit in the discomfort. Katie Jarvis, discovered working in a chip shop and cast with no prior acting experience, is remarkable. This is as far from a popcorn high school movie as you can get, but it belongs on this list as a reminder of what the genre can do when it’s genuinely trying.
21. She’s All That (1999)
Director: Robert Iscove | Cast: Freddie Prinze Jr., Rachael Leigh Cook, Matthew Lillard, Paul Walker
A certified time capsule from the exact peak of the late-90s teen rom-com industrial complex. Popular jock gets dumped, makes a bet with his mates that he can turn any girl into prom queen, targets a socially awkward art-obsessed girl, and then (you will be shocked to hear) actually falls for her.
She’s All That isn’t a film trying to subvert any tropes. It is the tropes. But Rachael Leigh Cook is genuinely charming — and the film is savvy enough to make Laney genuinely interesting rather than just waiting to be discovered by the right boy — and the chemistry between the two leads carries it across the finish line. It’s also a fascinating double bill with Not Another Teen Movie, which was made two years later specifically to eviscerate every plot beat this film established. The existence of one makes the other more interesting.
22. Foxfire (1996)
Director: Annette Haywood-Carter | Cast: Angelina Jolie, Hedy Burress, Jenny Lewis, Sarah Rosenberg
An adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel about four high school girls who form an unlikely bond after collectively beating up a teacher who has been sexually harassing female students. Foxfire is a coming-of-age film about the specific intensity of female teenage friendship — how quickly it can become all-consuming, and the difficulty of containing that energy within any safe structure.
Angelina Jolie is the wild card, playing the drifter Legs who arrives from nowhere, ignites the group, and becomes a kind of mythic figure to the other girls. It’s a very 90s film in its aesthetic and its handling of queer subtext — which is present but never quite made explicit — but the performances are strong and Oates’ original instincts for the material translate well. Worth seeking out, particularly if Booksmart and Eighth Grade are films you’ve already loved.
23. Wild Child (2008)
Director: Nick Moore | Cast: Emma Roberts, Natasha Richardson, Alex Pettyfer, Aidan Quinn
A slightly more English cousin of the American teen boarding-school comedy. Poppy Moore is a Malibu brat who gets shipped off to an English boarding school after one too many acts of expensive destruction, and the film follows her gradual transformation from aggressively awful person to someone who has figured out that performing hostility is not the same thing as being okay.
Wild Child is lighter fare than most of what surrounds it on this list, but it earns its emotional moment when the film finally lets Poppy’s real grief about her mother surface. It’s also one of Natasha Richardson’s final films, and she brings a warmth to her headmistress role that the film genuinely needs. Comfort food. Good for a rainy Tuesday.
24. John Tucker Must Die (2006)
Director: Betty Thomas | Cast: Jesse Metcalfe, Brittany Snow, Ashanti, Sophia Bush, Arielle Kebbel, Penn Badgley
Three girls from completely different social circles discover they’ve all been secretly dating the same basketball captain. Rather than turning on each other — which is what John Tucker was presumably counting on — they recruit a new girl in town to help them destroy him from the inside.
John Tucker Must Die is a revenge comedy as much as a teen rom-com, and it works because Betty Thomas keeps the focus on the three women rather than the object of their revenge. Brittany Snow, Ashanti and Sophia Bush have genuine chemistry as a wildly mismatched team, and the schemes they come up with have exactly the right level of escalating absurdity. Jesse Metcalfe’s John Tucker is a perfect comedy villain — charming enough that you understand why everyone fell for him, oblivious enough that watching him get dismantled is purely satisfying.
25. The Craft: Legacy (2020)
Director: Zoe Lister-Jones | Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Gideon Adlon, Lovie Simone, Zoey Luna, Nicholas Galitzine, David Duchovny
A belated sequel to the 1996 original that takes the premise — a coven of teenage witches testing the limits of their powers — and updates it for a contemporary audience. This more recent Craft film is more explicitly political than its predecessor and deals with questions of identity and solidarity in a way that feels of its moment.
Whether it lives up to the original depends significantly on your relationship to the original, which is the case with most legacy sequels. But Cailee Spaeny is enormously watchable in the lead, the coven dynamic is well-handled, and the film has genuine visual personality. As a standalone teen supernatural horror The Craft: Legacy is stronger than its mixed reception suggests, and as a companion piece to the 1996 film it has more interesting things to say than most sequels manage.
26. Juno (2007)
Director: Jason Reitman | Cast: Elliot Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney, J.K. Simmons
Diablo Cody’s screenplay — written in a hyper-stylised, wisecracking vernacular that was either fresh or insufferable depending on your tolerance — won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay, and the film became the unexpected arthouse breakout of 2007. Elliot Page plays Juno, a 16-year-old navigating an unplanned pregnancy with the kind of studied nonchalance that is itself a form of coping mechanism.
What Juno does well is take its characters seriously. Juno’s relationship with the adoptive couple (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) is complicated in ways that the film is honest about. Michael Cera’s Paulie is sweet without being a pushover. And the ending resists the easy resolution that a lesser film would have reached for. It’s a slightly self-conscious film, but its heart is in the right place and Page’s performance — still relatively early in their career — is genuinely excellent.
27. Sex Drive (2008)
Director: Sean Anders | Cast: Josh Zuckerman, Amanda Crew, Clark Duke, Seth Green, James Marsden
Sex Drive is a road trip comedy that arrives squarely in the American Pie tradition and is considerably sharper than it gets credit for. Ian steals his older brother’s car and drives across several states to meet up with a girl from the internet, with his best friends along for the ride — one of whom is clearly in love with him, which the film takes its time acknowledging.
Seth Green as an Amish mechanic is one of the stranger casting decisions of the late 2000s and somehow works perfectly. James Marsden, fully committed to playing Ian’s aggressively toxic older brother, appears to be having the time of his life. The film has more warmth underneath the raunchiness than you’d expect, and the central friendship between Ian and his two best friends feels genuine in a way that carries the whole thing.
28. Superbad (2007)
Director: Greg Mottola | Cast: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Seth Rogen, Bill Hader
Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg over the course of about a decade — starting when they were actually teenagers, which explains a lot — Superbad is one of the funniest films ever made and also, if you squint at it correctly, one of the more honest films about teenage male friendship and the terror of change.
Jonah Hill and Michael Cera are extraordinary together — Seth’s aggressive bluster and Evan’s quiet anxiety are perfectly matched, and the scenes where they’re arguing feel like watching two people who have known each other their whole lives. The Fogell/McLovin storyline with the cops is a masterpiece of escalating absurdity. And the emotional underpinning — two boys who are about to go to different colleges and are both terrified of how much they’ll miss each other — lands every single time because the film never overplays it. A classic.
29. You & Me Forever (2012)
Director: Fabio Del Greco | Cast: Cécile Cassel, Marie Kremer, Paz Vega
A quieter, more European entry in the coming-of-age genre. You & Me Forever is a drama about the intense, volatile friendship between two 16-year-old girls that is destabilised by the arrival of a more cosmopolitan, sexually confident newcomer. The film is interested in the possessiveness and jealousy that can exist in teenage female friendship — the way a best friend can be both the most important person in your world and the person most capable of destroying it.
Paz Vega is magnetic as María, the catalytic new arrival, and the film handles the bisexual dimensions of its central relationships with more honesty than a lot of European teen dramas of the era. Not widely seen outside of the festival circuit, but worth the effort of tracking down.
30. The Boy Next Door (2015)
Director: Rob Cohen | Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Guzman, John Corbett, Ian Nelson
Let’s be honest about what The Boy Next Door is: a gleefully trashy erotic thriller that commits fully to its own ridiculousness and is substantially more entertaining for it. Jennifer Lopez plays a high school teacher who has a one-night stand with her 19-year-old neighbour — who then turns out to be a student at her school, and then turns out to have a deranged obsession that makes everything considerably worse.
Ryan Guzman is genuinely unsettling when the film needs him to be, and Lopez navigates the absurdity of the premise with more skill than the reviews of the time gave her credit for. This is a film best watched with people who are ready to engage with it on its own entertainingly chaotic terms. Do not go in expecting Fatal Attraction. Do go in expecting a good time.
31. Cherry Falls (2000)
Director: Geoffrey Wright | Cast: Brittany Murphy, Jay Mohr, Gabriel Mann, Michael Biehn
A serial killer is murdering teenage virgins in a small town, which means the teenagers of Cherry Falls reach the extremely logical conclusion that the fastest way to survive is to have sex as quickly as possible. It is a bonkers premise and Cherry Falls runs with it with a kind of anarchic glee.
Brittany Murphy is excellent in the lead — she was consistently one of the most interesting performers in the teen/horror genre around this era — and the film’s twist, which involves a crossdressing killer and a fairly dark backstory, is genuinely more thoughtful than the premise suggests. It’s not a perfect horror film, but it has more personality than most of the slashers that surrounded it at the time. Worth a watch.
32. The DUFF (2015)
Director: Ari Sandel | Cast: Mae Whitman, Robbie Amell, Bella Thorne, Bianca Santos, Allison Janney, Ken Jeong
The concept — DUFF standing for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, meaning the approachable member of a social group that people befriend to get access to the more popular ones — is sharp enough that the film earns its 101 minutes on concept alone. Mae Whitman, one of the most criminally underused actresses of her generation, is superb as Bianca, navigating the discovery of her DUFF status with a combination of genuine hurt and very funny defiance.
Robbie Amell is game as the popular jock who offers to help her rebrand herself, and the film is smart enough to know that the expected romantic arc is less interesting than Bianca just deciding she doesn’t want to be transformed at all. Allison Janney as her mother delivers every line like she’s competing for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, which is exactly the right approach to this kind of role. The DUFF is a better teen comedy than its relatively quiet release deserved.
33. The Girl Next Door (2004)
Director: Luke Greenfield | Cast: Emile Hirsch, Elisha Cuthbert, Timothy Olyphant, James Remar
A high school valedictorian discovers that the girl who has moved in next door is a former adult film actress, and promptly allows this fact to complicate several years of careful planning. The Girl Next Door is smarter than its premise sounds — it’s genuinely interested in questions of reputation, second chances, and what it means to define someone by their past — and Timothy Olyphant as the predatory industry figure who shows up to complicate matters is the best thing in it.
Emile Hirsch has real charm in the lead, and the film is better when it’s playing its more dramatic moments straight than when it retreats into standard teen comedy beats. It’s an imperfect film, but it takes its characters more seriously than most films operating in this territory, and that counts for something.
34. The Edge of Seventeen (2016)
Director: Kelly Fremon Craig | Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Woody Harrelson, Blake Jenner, Haley Lu Richardson
One of the genuinely great teen films of the 2010s, The Edge of Seventeen is a movie that understands how catastrophically total every experience feels when you’re seventeen and your capacity for perspective hasn’t fully developed yet. Hailee Steinfeld plays Nadine, already awkward and raw-nerved, whose best friend starts dating her brother — and the film tracks the full fallout of that betrayal with a precision that is frequently very funny and occasionally absolutely devastating.
Woody Harrelson as her English teacher — who is not, crucially, a cool or inspirational teacher, but a tired, sardonic one who is nevertheless genuinely paying attention — is a masterclass in doing a lot with a small role. Steinfeld anchors the whole thing with a performance that requires her to be unlikeable and sympathetic simultaneously, and she pulls it off effortlessly. A film that rewards revisiting.
35. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
Director: Stephen Chbosky | Cast: Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, Mae Whitman, Paul Rudd
Stephen Chbosky adapted his own novel — a book that has been on school banned lists and summer reading lists simultaneously for three decades — and the film carries the weight of the source material’s emotional honesty intact. Logan Lerman plays Charlie, a quiet, traumatised freshman who is befriended by two unconventional seniors: free-spirited Sam (Emma Watson) and her wildly charismatic stepbrother Patrick (Ezra Miller, in what remains one of his best performances).
The Perks of Being A Wallflower is genuinely beautiful in places — the tunnel scene, Charlie standing in the back of the truck with his arms out, is the kind of image that burns itself into the memory — and it handles its more difficult material (trauma, mental health, the specific way that some things that happen in childhood don’t fully surface until later) with real care. One of the better literary adaptations of its era, and a film that earns its place as a touchstone for a generation of teenagers who recognised themselves in Charlie’s letters.
What Did You Think of These High School Movies?
Did any of these make your own list? Did we miss something essential — Heathers, Dazed and Confused, Lady Bird, Clueless? (Yes, I know. Another list, another time.)
Let me know on social media.
