10 Teen Movies That Are Smarter Than You Think

Sitting at the intersection between comedy and romance, the teen movie is a staple subgenre that has remained popular ever since John Hughes made it a cinematic mainstay in the 1980s. But not all teen movies have John Cusack on the lawn with a boombox or Judd Nelson thrusting his fist in the air to Simple Minds.

The '90s and 2000s saw a boom that produced as many all-time classics as flops, before the streamers opened the floodgates in the 2010s, oversaturating the market with low-budget, poorly written, no-star efforts that have made it difficult to sort the queen bees from the wannabes. And for a genre that was never taken seriously to begin with, this has been a major blow.

Nonetheless, amid the ever-increasing barrage of fluff and nonsense of the past few decades, there are a handful of teen movies that set themselves apart. Yes, they tread the high school corridors, but they do it while developing elevated humour, meaning, and intelligence behind their apparently inconsequential facades. After all, 10 Things is a Shakespeare play in high school duds; Easy A combines classic literature with a wry reverence for its generic forebears; and Bottoms offers a meta take on the teen genre as a whole.

While the following ten films may appear to the untrained eye to be just like any other teen movie, they're way smarter than you might think. 

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.