Top 20 High School Movies

There was a time when Lindsay Lohan was best known for her acting rather than her party-hopping. Showcasing La Lohan in arguably her best role to date, this Tina Fey-scripted film also boasts a breakout turn by Rachel McAdams as evil queen bee Regina George ("Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen! It's not going to happen!"). While Mean Girls is technically a comedy, its depiction of girl-on-girl cattiness stings incredibly true.

"You're tearing me apart," Jim Stark (James Dean) howls at his parents. For the new kid in school, it doesn't get any easier. Though he finds a friend in the extremely troubled Plato (Sam Mineo), Stark gets into it on his first day with a gang of bullies, in a knife fight and later in a chickie run. Dean was a refreshing change from the well-scrubbed teens of earlier Hollywood films. Here was a character young audiences could finally recognize.

We see it as we want to see it - in the simplest terms, the most convenient definition: The Breakfast Club is the best high school movie of all time. It may lack the scope of its peers - the drinking, the driving, the listless loitering in parking lots - as well as any scenes that actually take place during school.

When screenwriter Cameron Crowe went undercover to observe the species Teenagerus americanus, he returned with more than the usual grab-bag of anecdotes about horny, apple-pie-humping guys and the popularity-obsessed girls who must fight them off with a stick.

Stand and Deliver - 1988

Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson likes high school girls because even though he gets older, they stay the same age. We feel the same way about Richard Linklater's minutiae-filled comedic epic about the last day of school in 1976 - we may get older, but Dazed is ageless. And for a movie featuring so many stoners, Dazed is mammothly ambitious: Few other films say as much about starting, sticking around in, and leaving high school.