10 Most Inspirational Teen Movies Of All Time

10. Mean Girls (2004)

“Calling somebody else fat won't make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn't make you any smarter.”

The high water mark for Lindsay Lohan’s acting career is actually pretty damn high indeed. New kid Cady Heron becomes a part of the popular girls’ clique at the school in order to ridicule them with her misfit friends, but finds that being a ‘mean girl’ is contagious…

Written by Tina Fey, based on a non-fiction book about helping your daughter survive high school with her self respect intact, the screenplay is about half and half comedy and sociological experiment. Unlike Heathers, whose protagonist finds herself in a similar boat, Mean Girls takes pains to allow the audience to empathise with all of the characters on show, not just the ‘underdog’ unpopular kids.

Mean Girls avoids cliché as much as possible, while still hitting all the right genre touchstones for a good teen flick - and this is a great teen flick, self-deprecatingly funny, charming and heartfelt. Cady’s complete inexperience with the high school dynamic allows for some cogent moments of clarity - like when she realises that until she started at high school, "I had never lived in a world where adults didn't trust me."

That’s a key experience for many people that age: having your power, your agency removed from you at a time when you need it to discover exactly who you are and who you want to be, because ‘teenagers can’t be trusted’.

The real story of Mean Girls is that Cady turns the problem around on her own: she sees how she screwed up, apologises, makes amends and gladly returns to being a math nerd, all without requiring the guidance of a wise best friend, sister, teacher or parent. Sometimes teenagers really can be trusted.