Best High School Movies

Two unpopular best friends (Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri) start a girls' fight club under the pretext of self-defense, mostly to get close to the cheerleaders they are in love with. Emma Seligman shoots it as gleeful, absurd, R-rated chaos where nobody is punished for wanting things.

This is high-school comedy at its most gloriously unhinged, and the newest sign of how far the genre has come: the queer girls are the horny, scheming leads, not the sidekicks. Bottoms takes everything the classics did for straight boys and hands it to two teenagers who are more than happy to throw a punch.

Two girls at an elite school, one fallen from the top of the social ladder and one the invisible new kid, agree to carry out each other's revenge, Strangers on a Train in designer uniforms. Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke play it with candy-colored, knife-edge cool.

It is the modern teen movie as pure aesthetic pleasure, and it knows exactly which classics it is remixing (Heathers, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls) while turning them queerer and slyer. School here is a battlefield of image and status, filmed like a fashion editorial where the body count is reputations.

A shy straight-A loner (Leah Lewis) makes money writing other kids' papers, then gets hired by a sweet, inarticulate jock to ghostwrite love letters to the girl he likes, the same girl she is quietly falling for herself. Alice Wu turns a Cyrano setup into something tender and specific.

It is the quiet, bookish end of the modern wave: a coming-of-age about faith, friendship, and a first crush that is not going to resolve the way a formula wants. School here is a small town's whole world, and the film treats a teenager's inner life with real seriousness.

Two academic overachievers (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) realize on the eve of graduation that the classmates they looked down on got into good colleges too, and had fun doing it. So they set out to cram four years of missed partying into one chaotic night. Olivia Wilde's debut is fast, warm, and best-friend-shaped.

It is the modern Superbad with the genders flipped and the heart doubled, and it belongs to the female-led comedy boom the last decade delivered. Under the raunch it is about the specific ache of leaving high school and the friend who defined it.

Bo Burnham follows a painfully shy thirteen-year-old (Elsie Fisher) through the last week of middle school as she posts chirpy advice videos nobody watches and tries to survive a pool party. It is the most accurate film ever made about being a teenager with a phone in your hand.

This is school in the anxiety-and-algorithm era, and no other film on the list captures it so exactly: the group chats, the performance of confidence, the low hum of dread. Funny and almost unbearably kind, it treats an ordinary kid's ordinary week as high drama, because at that age it is.

Greta Gerwig's solo debut follows a Sacramento senior (Saoirse Ronan) who renames herself Lady Bird and wants desperately to get out of her Catholic school, her city, and the orbit of a mother she loves and fights in the same breath. It is specific, funny, and quietly enormous.

School here is the backdrop to the real subject: the year you start becoming someone your parents did not plan. Lady Bird is the prestige end of the modern coming-of-age, the one that made critics take the genre seriously again, and its ache is universal even when every detail is exact.

Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) is a sharp, miserable seventeen-year-old whose best friend starts dating her older brother, sending her into a spiral of brilliant, self-sabotaging sarcasm. Kelly Fremon Craig writes her as funny and genuinely hard to be around, and loves her anyway.

It is the modern heir to the wit of the classics, a teenager who uses cleverness as armor over a lot of real fear. The film lets its heroine be prickly and wrong and still worth rooting for, and it understands that the meanest kid in the room is often the one hurting most.

A shy freshman (Logan Lerman) recovering from trauma gets taken in by a pair of senior misfits (Emma Watson and Ezra Miller) who show him mixtapes, midnight drives, and what it feels like to belong. Stephen Chbosky adapts his own novel with total sincerity.

It is the emotional bridge between the 2000s and now, the film a whole generation of teenagers claimed as theirs. School here is where you find the people who make you feel infinite, and it treats first friendships and first heartbreaks with a seriousness the genre had drifted away from.

Two inseparable friends (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) try to buy alcohol for a party on the theory that it will finally get them girlfriends, on the last stretch before college pulls them apart. Judd Apatow produced it; it is crude, quotable, and secretly a love story between two best friends.

This is the raunchy-comedy peak the modern wave grew out of and keeps rewriting (Booksmart owes it everything). Under the filth it is about the specific terror of graduating away from the one person who has known you your whole life.

Tina Fey's high-school comedy turns teenage social warfare into a precise, quotable science, as new girl Cady (Lindsay Lohan) infiltrates the most popular clique and slowly becomes what she meant to expose. Two decades on, it is still the sharpest map of how a school's food chain actually works.

This is where the whole modern wave points back to. Every film above owes it something: the queen bees, the burn book, the exact grammar of teenage cruelty and comedy. Do Revenge and Bottoms are its direct heirs, and Booksmart argues with it. A fitting place to end, since it is the film they are all still answering.