The Breakfast Club
1985, R, 97 min.
Directed by John Hughes, Starring Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy.

Before lapsing into the land of the insipid, where the reigning presumption is that in order to make films which speak to young people everything must be dumbed way down, John Hughes actually made a few movies that shined some light on the trials of modern adolescence. The Breakfast Club is one of them. The movie takes place over the course of one daylong Saturday detention during which several distinctive teen “types” have been thrust together. By dinnertime, their flaky crusts have thawed.

This article appears in June 30 • 2000.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.