20 Essential Coming Of Age Movies That Changed Your Life

8. The Graduate

Love and lust can be fickle things, leading us to do things we know that we shouldn't but somehow find ourselves unable to resist. That's certainly the situation Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) finds himself facing in The Graduate, Mike Nichols's 1967 adaptation of Charles Webb's novel of the same name. When Braddock finds himself seduced by an older woman, Mrs Robinson (the sultry and alluring Anne Bancroft) the last thing he expects is to fall in love with her beautiful daughter Elaine (the stunning Katharine Ross). But when this inevitably happens it doesn't take long for Braddock to cock things up, and in spectacular fashion. The "older woman" fantasy has never been so perfectly captured in film as it is in The Graduate - Bancroft herself admitted years later that "men still come up to me and tell me 'You were my first sexual fantasy'". No doubt some readers can identify with this.