20 Essential Coming Of Age Movies That Changed Your Life

16. The Breakfast Club

Undoubtedly one of the most beloved coming-of-age movies to emerge from America in the 1980s, John Hughes's The Breakfast Club is a wonderfully low-key yet resonant portrayal of high school stereotypes spending an afternoon together in detention while coming to realise that they have far more in common with one another than they first assumed. Starring Judd Nelson (whatever happened to him?), Emilio Estevez and 80s teen comedy stalwart Molly Ringwald as the naughty kids forced to give up their Saturday afternoon, The Breakfast Club is a quintessential Brat Pack movie. Warm, charming and ultimately more insightful than it initially appears, it's a film which resonates with practically everyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s thanks to John Bender's (Nelson) defiant fist-thrust into the sky, capturing in freeze-frame at the end of the film an iconic moment of quiet rebellion.