Though they evolve every few years along with teenage culture itself, teen movies are time capsules forever documenting a time and place on celluloid – as well as containing formative performances from cinematic greats. Team Empire opened up its old angst-filled diaries to draw up a list of the best teen movies – the most quotable, banger-fuelled, swoonsome classics that capture all the pain and glory of the teenage experience.
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Teen movies aren’t just films featuring teens – they say something about what it is to be a teenager, dialling in on the secondary school years where social circles are everything, first loves are life or death, and the promise of a bigger future awaits. Whether you’re a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess or a criminal, there's something here for you. If John Hughes' high school rom-coms are in many ways outdated, Susan Johnson's film continues their legacy with fizz and wit.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. 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.
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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). Generation gaps have rarely been so vividly drawn as when Stark screams to his parents, "You're tearing me apart!" Read The Empire Review 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.Īll 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. 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.