10. The Breakfast Club
I saw it on TV again recently and was just bowled over by it. In it’s own way it’s very intense: you’ve only basically got seven characters and they’re all in same set up. There’s very little break out from the library where they’re all stuck. And so you really get the character development and the inter-relationships, and you really get to the heart of the kind of teenage cruelties and the way it all dissolves with their common plight. It’s a very clever film. It’s one of those films that creates a whole genre, not all of which I like – St Elmo’s Fire, for example, was so sentimental it made me want to puke, but The Breakfast Club isn’t like that. It’s taut and it’s very much about the teenage condition.
