10 Teen Movies That Are Smarter Than You Think

10. Booksmart (2019)

Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a film with "smart" in its title is more intelligent than the average teen comedy, and yet the meaning of "book smart" is someone who is well read but pretty dumb out in the real world.

And that is kinda who Booksmart’s protagonists, Molly and Amy (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever), are. The high schoolers are reaching graduation having never gone in for the parties, sex, and juvenile chaos their classmates thrive on, and feel they’ve missed out. Thus, they embark on a time-honoured escapade through various drug-and-drink-fuelled parties and awkward romantic situations with their contemporaries.

While this all sounds familiar to anyone who was alive and watching in the 2000s, Booksmart manages to take the Superbad template and make it relevant for a generation concerned with inclusivity and diversity, conforming to some of the Jonah Hill film's tropes and flipping others on their head. It manages to walk the tightrope of being genuine and relevant while going all-out on the physical comedy and giving a platform for the girls to be just as gross and sex obsessed as their male counterparts. And the all-female writing team manages to give this a feminist throughline that feels empowering, built around the idea of authentic personal discovery.