The Breakfast Club (1985)

“Hughes must refer to this as his ‘”Bergman film”: lots of deep talk and ripping off of psychic scabs. But this film maker is, spookily, inside kids. He knows how the ordinary teenagers, the ones who don’t get movies made about them, think and feel: why the nerd would carry a fake ID (”So I can vote”), and why the deb would finally be nice to the strange girl (” ‘Cause you’re letting me”). He has learned their dialect and decoded it for sympathetic adults. With a minimum of genre pandering—only one Footloose dance imitation—and with the help of his gifted young ensemble, Hughes shows there is a life form after teenpix. It is called goodpix.” — Richard Corliss, TIME

SYNOPSIS

Few films have captured the anxieties and aspirations of adolescence as enduringly as John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. Set over the course of a single Saturday detention, Hughes brings together five high school students from different social cliques—the athlete, the brain, the basket case, the princess, and the rebel—who gradually discover that their carefully cultivated identities conceal shared fears, frustrations, and vulnerabilities. Featuring defining performances from Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, and Paul Gleason, this landmark coming-of-age comedy remains a touchstone of 1980s American cinema, finding surprising emotional depth within the familiar rituals of suburban high school life.