10 Teen Movies That Are Smarter Than You Think

Mark Waters and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls is to the 2000s what Clueless was to the '90s, simultaneously capturing and creating the zeitgeist while serving up an infinitely quotable teen comedy.

Back before Lindsay Lohan went off the rails, she was Cady Heron, the newcomer at North Shore High School, whose childhood of home-schooling in Africa leaves her woefully underprepared for her new life as a US teen. North Shore is all but run by the Plastics, a trio of mean girls led by queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams) that allow Cady into their ranks - a position that gives her the opportunity to report back to her outcast friends on all the nasty things they get up to, while quietly undermining them. 

Though this obviously pays homage to Heathers, Mean Girls is very much its own thing.

Loosely based around ideas extracted from Rosalind Wiseman’s self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes, Fey’s whip-smart writing deconstructs the power relations and sociology of the high school experience. Yes, it’s funny as hell, but it also provides a unique commentary on our high school experiences, showing how the cliques, conformity, posturing, hierarchy, and exclusionary practices bridge the gap between the natural and human worlds, and how we may not be as evolved as we think.