The Breakfast Club

Hughes has a wonderful knack for communicating the feelings of teenagers, as well as an obvious rapport with his exceptional cast - who deserve top grades.

Hughes may deserve more plaudits as a social worker than a filmmaker, but you have to admit his hokey situation plays. The reason is the five terrific young actors, who bring more conviction to these parts than they perhaps deserve.

Nothing really changes. You hear nothing you haven't heard before. But you know that for them it is happening for the first time, and they deserve compassion. I'm not sure that's a good enough reason to see "The Breakfast Club."

Rarely have on-screen teens felt this authentic. They bluster, bicker and trade horrible insults (whence the film's R rating), then suddenly expose their most guarded feelings.

While meticulously drawn, the film's characters are so stereotypically representative that only the lamest of moviegoers will not determine their respective backgrounds and problems long before the plodding movie does.

In nine hours of threatening, bickering and, eventually, poignant (but never maudlin) self-revelation, the stereotypes dissolve and re-form.

Had something to say about being an adult and how the lessons we learned as a teenager would carry us in to adulthood, for better and for worse.

Molière's most famous work, Tartuffe, is about a pious fraud who turns out to be a criminal... The joke is that Bender is a criminal fraud who turns out to be pious.

...doesn't just remember or understand what it's like to be a teenager. The Breakfast Club embodies the experience.

an awakening

[VIDEO ESSAY] The movie captures teenagers' innate ability to defeat authority figures, and their own misconceptions about themselves.