Adolescence is the most reliable subject in cinema because the stakes are enormous and completely unserious at the same time. A film can be about whether somebody gets into a car, and the audience will treat it as life or death, because at seventeen it was.
Which is why the horror entries below sit comfortably beside the dramas. Carrie, It Follows and Jennifer’s Body are about the same thing Lady Bird is about, and they have the advantage of being able to make the metaphor literal.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year.
1. The 400 Blows (1959)
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"Truffaut’s debut, and the last shot is a boy looking directly at you with nowhere left to run."
The 400 Blows is first because it refuses every consolation the genre normally supplies. Antoine Doinel is failed by school, by his parents and by the reformatory system in turn, and nobody in the film learns anything or is redeemed.
Truffaut had been that boy. He was sent to an observation centre for delinquents at fourteen, his stepfather had him arrested for theft, and André Bazin got him out. The material is not researched and the film does not editorialise about any of it.
The final sequence is a long run to a sea Antoine has never seen, and then a freeze frame as he turns to the camera at the exact moment the story would have to declare what happens next. Declining to is what has kept it alive for sixty-five years, and Jean-Pierre Léaud went on to play the character in four more films across twenty years.
Truffaut had been a critic attacking French cinema and this is the film he made to demonstrate what he meant, drawing on his own detention as a boy.
The final shot, a freeze frame on Antoine at the sea he has never seen, was an accident of not knowing how to end and became the most imitated ending in cinema.
Jean-Pierre Léaud was fourteen at casting and played the same character across five films over twenty years.
2. WarGames (1983)
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"A teenager nearly starts a nuclear war looking for video games, and the computing is right."
WarGames earns its position twice over. As a thriller it is impeccably constructed, and as a technical document it was accurate enough to change federal policy.
The war-dialling, the default passwords, the social engineering of a school secretary and the backdoor left by a programmer in memory of his dead son are all real techniques presented correctly. Reagan watched it, asked the Joint Chiefs whether it could happen, and the resulting review produced the first national directive on computer security.
Underneath the thriller it is a coming of age film about a bright, bored, unsupervised kid with no outlet, whose parents barely register that he exists, and the Falken material is mentorship written without a trace of sentiment.
Reagan watched it, asked the Joint Chiefs whether it could happen, and the review that followed produced the first national directive on computer security.
The war-dialling, the default passwords and the social engineering are all real methods presented correctly.
Underneath it the film is about a bright unsupervised kid with no outlet, and the Falken material is mentorship written without sentiment.
3. Cruel Intentions (1999)
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"The best classical adaptation American teen cinema has produced."
Cruel Intentions moved Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Manhattan private schools and kept the cruelty entirely intact, which nobody expected from a 1999 teen film and which is why it is this high.
The wager structure of Laclos survives the transposition without modification because the social conditions map almost exactly. A closed aristocracy, reputation as currency, and women with no route to power except through men they can manipulate.
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Kathryn is the film’s real achievement. She plays a girl who has correctly identified that she will never be permitted to want anything openly, and whose cruelty is the only expression available to her. The film ends by destroying her publicly, which is the 1782 ending unchanged.
It transposes Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Manhattan private schools and keeps the structure almost exactly, including the wager and the letter.
Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Kathryn as somebody performing wholesomeness continuously, and the crucifix full of cocaine is the entire character.
The ending punishes her publicly rather than privately, which is the adaptation’s one significant change and the correct one.
4. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
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"The film that invented the teenager as a subject, and all three leads died young."
Rebel Without a Cause is the origin point for everything else on this list. Before it, American cinema had children and adults; this is the film that proposed a third category with its own interior life and its own crisis.
The argument is that the adults have abdicated rather than oppressed. Jim’s father wears an apron and will not take a position, Judy’s father recoils from her, and Plato’s parents are simply absent. The children build a substitute family in an abandoned mansion because nobody has provided a real one.
Dean died a month before release, aged twenty-four. Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976 and Natalie Wood drowned in 1981, which has given the film a reputation it did not ask for and cannot shake.
Dean died a month before release and the film became a memorial, which permanently changed how it is watched.
The planetarium sequence and the chickie run are the two set pieces, and the film’s argument is that the parents are the problem.
Nicholas Ray shot it in CinemaScope, which was unusual for a contemporary drama and lets him compose the family in the same frame at a distance.
5. American Graffiti (1973)
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"One night in Modesto in 1962, and the epilogue is a gut punch."
American Graffiti covers a single night of cruising before two friends leave for college, has no score at all, and runs entirely on a wall-to-wall radio soundtrack diegetically sourced from car speakers.
Lucas shot it in twenty-eight nights for around three quarters of a million dollars, and the technique of cutting between four parallel storylines with no scenes of anybody explaining themselves is why it still moves.
Then the closing title cards tell you what happened to each of the boys. One killed by a drunk driver, one missing in action near An Loc, and two hours of amiable drifting is retroactively converted into something considerably harder. The girls get no cards, which was the convention and reads badly now.
Lucas shot it in twenty-eight nights on around three quarters of a million dollars, and the studio wanted it shelved.
The soundtrack is diegetic throughout, coming from car radios all tuned to the same station, which is why it never feels applied.
The closing cards stating what happened to each boy were Lucas’s idea and have been copied constantly since.
6. Carrie (1976)
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"De Palma’s King adaptation, and the horror is the mother rather than the telekinesis."
Carrie is on this list rather than a horror list because the supernatural element is almost incidental to what the film is about. A girl who has been told nothing about her own body is humiliated in a shower, and the telekinesis is a consequence rather than a subject.
Piper Laurie plays the mother as sincerely devout rather than as a monster, which is the decision the film rests on. She believes every word she says, loves her daughter, and is therefore unbearable in a way a straightforward villain could not be.
Both Laurie and Sissy Spacek were nominated for Academy Awards, which was unprecedented for a horror film, and the split-screen prom sequence is De Palma using technique to show an event and its consequence simultaneously.
De Palma cast the film jointly with George Lucas, who was casting Star Wars, and the two productions shared auditions.
The split-screen at the prom is the technique the film is remembered for and was a solution to not being able to afford coverage.
Sissy Spacek slept in her costume during the shoot and insisted on real pig’s blood substitute being poured repeatedly.
7. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
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"The founding document of the modern American teen film, and it has a subplot nobody expects."
Fast Times is the founding document of the form and its texture comes from reporting rather than from memory. Cameron Crowe was twenty-two, enrolled at a San Diego high school undercover for a year, and wrote the book from what he watched.
That is why the mall jobs, the scheduling, the boredom and the specific economics of teenage employment are right. Nothing in it is a writer remembering being young; it is a journalist taking notes.
It is remembered for Spicoli and the pool sequence, and the material that lasts is Stacy’s abortion, handled matter-of-factly with no crisis, no lecture and no punishment, in a studio comedy released in 1982. No mainstream American film would attempt that now.
Cameron Crowe went undercover in a real high school for a year to write the book it is based on.
Amy Heckerling directs it without judging anybody, including the abortion subplot, which almost no film of the period managed.
Sean Penn improvised substantial portions of Spicoli and the cast includes Cage, Whitaker and Anthony Edwards before any of them were known.
8. The Breakfast Club (1985)
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"Five teenagers in a room for a day, and it is almost entirely dialogue."
The Breakfast Club is structurally a play. Hughes confines the film to a library on a Saturday detention, gives five archetypes nowhere to go, and lets them dismantle each other across roughly eight hours of story time.
Hughes wrote it in two days and shot it in sequence, which is unusual and visible. The performances build on each other because they were performed in order, and the circle scene was substantially improvised from that foundation.
The ending has been argued about for forty years and the argument is the point. The film knows the alliance will not survive Monday, says so out loud in Brian’s essay, and then ends on a freeze frame anyway.
It takes place in one room across one day and the entire plot is five people deciding whether to tell each other the truth.
Hughes wrote the first draft in two days and shot it in sequence, which is unusual and is why the performances build.
The closing letter is the film’s argument stated plainly, which it has earned by then and which almost nothing else could get away with.
9. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
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"The Taming of the Shrew relocated to Seattle, and it fixes the play’s ending."
10 Things I Hate About You keeps Shakespeare’s structure and rejects his conclusion, which is a harder and more useful adaptation decision than modernising the language.
In the play Katherina is broken and delivers a speech about obedience. Here Kat is never broken, the deception is exposed, and the reconciliation is conditional on Patrick having actually wronged her and admitting it. The romance survives on her terms.
Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles are both better than the genre required, and the poem in the final act, written as a class assignment and delivered in tears, is the best-written thing in any teen film of the period.
It adapts The Taming of the Shrew and keeps the structure while completely inverting the argument.
Heath Ledger was nineteen and Australian and the stadium serenade was largely unscripted in its blocking.
The poem in the final act is the film’s title and the reason it survived a cycle that produced dozens of these.
10. It Follows (2014)
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"A curse transmitted sexually, which walks toward you forever at a constant speed."
It Follows gives its monster exactly one rule and builds the entire film around it. The thing walks, never runs, never stops, and can look like anybody. That is the whole mythology.
The consequence is that every wide shot becomes a search. Mitchell composes deep frames with figures moving in the far background and never tells the audience which one matters, so the viewer does the work continuously without being prompted.
The suburban Detroit setting is deliberately unplaceable in time, with cathode televisions beside a clamshell e-reader, which removes the film from any specific decade. It is about consequence rather than punishment, which is why it survives the reading its premise invites.
The rule is stated once and never broken, which is what makes every wide shot in the film unbearable.
Mitchell deliberately removed all period markers, so the cars, the televisions and the clothes belong to no decade.
The Disasterpeace score is the most influential horror soundtrack since Carpenter and was written before the film was cut.
11. Lady Bird (2017)
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"Gerwig’s debut, and the subject is a mother and daughter who cannot stop wounding each other."
Lady Bird is the best recent entry in the form and its achievement is that the mother is right about most things and expresses it unbearably, so neither woman can be dismissed by the audience.
The film opens with them crying together at an audiobook and then arguing so completely that the daughter throws herself out of a moving car, which is the whole relationship in ninety seconds.
The financial pressure is the substrate. The father has lost his job and is depressed, the mother works double shifts as a psychiatric nurse, and the daughter is applying to schools the family cannot afford while insisting on a name nobody gave her.
Gerwig’s solo directing debut, set in Sacramento in 2002, and the mother-daughter relationship is the entire subject.
The opening has the two of them crying at an audiobook and then arguing within thirty seconds, which is the film in one scene.
It was nominated for five Academy Awards and Laurie Metcalf’s performance is the one the film cannot work without.
12. The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
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"Huston’s film about a boy’s first battle, cut to pieces by the studio."
The Red Badge of Courage is a coming of age film in which the coming of age is a boy discovering he will run. Huston adapted Crane’s novel and MGM removed roughly forty minutes and added explanatory narration after disastrous previews.
Lillian Ross documented the whole process for the New Yorker and published it as Picture, which is the best book ever written about how a studio destroys a film and is more famous than the film itself.
What survives is a genuine account of fear, with Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War, cast as a boy who runs from his first engagement. Huston knew exactly what he was doing with that.
Huston’s cut ran ninety minutes and MGM reduced it to sixty-nine, removing most of the interior material.
Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War, plays a boy discovering he is a coward.
Lillian Ross wrote a book about the production’s destruction which is better known than the film itself.
13. Risky Business (1983)
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"A film about a teenager discovering he is good at capitalism, and the original ending was bleaker."
Risky Business is considerably darker than its reputation and the reputation is the studio’s fault. Brickman’s film has a high-achieving North Shore student run a brothel from his parents’ house and discover he has a genuine aptitude for it.
The Princeton interviewer being impressed by the enterprise is the film’s actual argument, which is that the qualities rewarded by American business are not admirable ones.
The original ending had Joel not get into Princeton and the relationship end, and Warner required a reshoot after previews. Brickman has been clear about which version he made, and the film is better read with that knowledge.
The ending was changed after test screenings, and the original had Joel not getting into Princeton, which is the film the first two acts are building.
Tangerine Dream’s score and the subway sequence give the film a register nobody expected from a teen comedy.
Paul Brickman never made anything comparable again and has been open that the studio’s changes are the reason.
14. Dead Poets Society (1989)
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"A teacher who inspires his students and is destroyed by the consequences."
Dead Poets Society is a considerably harder film than the carpe diem posters suggest. Keating encourages a boy to defy his father, the boy kills himself, the school scapegoats the teacher, and nothing is repaired.
Weir shoots the school as an institution designed to produce compliance, and the film’s most honest scene is Neil’s father explaining, with total sincerity, the sacrifices he has made and why they entitle him to choose his son’s life.
The desk-standing ending is the compromise and it is not a victory. The boys are expelled or will be, Keating is gone, and the gesture changes nothing except what they will remember.
Robin Williams plays Keating almost entirely straight, with the improvisation confined to two scenes and the rest performed as written.
The film’s argument is complicated by its own ending, since Keating’s methods contribute directly to a death.
Weir shot it in sequence in a real school in winter, and the cast were made to live in the dormitories.
15. But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
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"A conversion therapy camp rendered in pink and blue, and the satire is precise."
But I’m a Cheerleader does its arguing through production design. The camp teaches gender through colour-coded rooms, pink for girls and blue for boys, and assigns chores accordingly, so the absurdity is visible in every frame without a line of dialogue.
That approach is why it works. The film never has a character deliver a speech about the programme being ridiculous; it simply shows the curriculum, which includes learning to vacuum and to change a tyre.
It was given an NC-17 initially, was dismissed on release, and has been steadily reassessed since, largely because the target has not gone away. RuPaul plays the camp’s ex-gay counsellor in a tracksuit.
Jamie Babbit shoots the conversion camp in saturated pink and blue, which turns the enforcement of gender roles into a visual joke.
It was given an NC-17 initially for material considerably milder than heterosexual equivalents passing with an R.
RuPaul appears as an ex-gay counsellor in a T-shirt reading straight is great, which is the film’s method in one image.
16. Ride with the Devil (1999)
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"Ang Lee’s overlooked Civil War film, about boys on the wrong side."
Ride with the Devil is a coming of age film in which the education is that the cause was indefensible. Lee follows Missouri bushwhackers through the border war, including the sacking of Lawrence, and the boys riding are children who joined for loyalty rather than politics.
Jeffrey Wright plays a freed Black man riding with Confederate irregulars out of obligation to the man who freed him, which is a genuinely difficult historical position the film does not simplify.
It was barely released, cut by the studio, and is the least seen major film by a director who won two Academy Awards. The restored version is the one to watch.
Ang Lee’s Civil War film follows Missouri bushwhackers, which is the side American cinema does not dramatise.
Jeffrey Wright plays a freed man riding with them out of loyalty to the person who freed him.
It was barely released and recut by the studio, and the director’s version restored a great deal of what made it coherent.
17. Bring It On (2000)
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"A cheerleading comedy that is actually about plagiarism and who owns a routine."
Bring It On is the best sports film in this list and the sport is cheerleading. Kirsten Dunst’s squad discovers its championship routines were stolen from a predominantly Black school in Compton, and the film does not resolve that easily or quickly.
The stolen routines are the plot rather than a complication. The squad has to build something new, is worse at it, and loses, and the film’s ending is that they come second and it was the right outcome.
Gabrielle Union’s Isis is given an actual position rather than a lesson to deliver, and the sports-movie structure is executed properly, which almost none of its imitators managed.
The premise is that the champion squad has been stealing its routines from a Black school in Compton, which the film states in the first act.
Peyton Reed shoots the routines at full body in long takes, which is why the athleticism reads.
It is considerably smarter about appropriation than its reputation and was written as a straight drama before being rewritten as comedy.
18. Brick (2005)
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"Hammett dialogue in a Californian high school, played completely straight."
Brick is a genre transplant that works because nothing in the film acknowledges the joke. A student investigates an ex-girlfriend’s death using the full vocabulary and structure of 1930s hardboiled fiction, and nobody ever pauses to notice.
The slang is never explained. Characters say bulls, yeggs and duck soup, and the audience is expected to keep up exactly as a reader of Hammett would be. Johnson wrote a glossary and refused to put it in the film.
The vice-principal functions as the police chief and the meeting takes place in his office over an apple juice, which is the single best translation of a convention in the film.
Johnson wrote a glossary of the slang and refused to include it, so the audience acquires the dialect the way a reader of Hammett does.
The vice-principal functions as the police chief in a meeting conducted over apple juice.
It cost around half a million dollars, was shot in Johnson’s old high school in San Clemente, and launched both him and Gordon-Levitt.
19. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
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"Marketed as a sex comedy, is a film about a girl destroyed by men and turned into a weapon."
Jennifer’s Body is the standard example of a marketing mismatch destroying a film. Kusama and Cody made a horror picture about female friendship in which a girl is sacrificed by an indie band seeking commercial success and comes back as something else.
The studio sold it on Megan Fox’s body to an audience of teenage boys, including promotional material shot separately from the film, and the actual audience for it did not learn it existed for a decade.
The reassessment has been total. The sacrifice sequence is genuinely horrifying, the friendship is the subject, and the film is angrier about the music industry than anybody noticed in 2009.
Diablo Cody wrote it and the marketing sold it as a Megan Fox vehicle to an audience the film was not made for.
The subject is a friendship destroyed by an assault, with the supernatural material as the mechanism rather than the point.
It was dismissed on release and has been comprehensively reassessed, which is one of the clearest reversals in recent criticism.
20. Taps (1981)
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"Cadets seize their own academy, and the film lets the logic run to its end."
Taps follows its premise to a genuinely bleak conclusion. Military school cadets occupy the campus with live weapons when the trustees announce closure for a condominium development, and the film does not step in to rescue them.
Timothy Hutton leads, and Sean Penn and Tom Cruise are both in early roles, with Cruise as the cadet who cannot stop escalating and who has to be shot by his own side.
The argument is about boys taught duty without judgment. They have been given a code and no framework for deciding when it applies, and George C. Scott’s commandant, who taught it to them, is removed from the film early and deliberately.
A military academy cadet corps occupies its own school when it is scheduled for closure, and the film takes their position seriously before dismantling it.
Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise and Sean Penn are all in it early, and Cruise’s part was expanded during production.
George C. Scott appears briefly and the film’s argument is about what happens when boys are given a code and no judgment.
21. The Outsiders (1983)
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"Coppola adapting S.E. Hinton, with half of 1980s Hollywood in the cast."
The Outsiders is worth knowing for the casting alone. Dillon, Macchio, Swayze, Lowe, Cruise, Estevez and Howell, none of them known at the time, in a film Coppola made because a school librarian and her class wrote and asked him to.
The theatrical cut is the problem. Coppola removed a substantial amount of Hinton’s novel, including most of the framing and the character material, leaving a compressed film that moves too fast to land.
The Complete Novel version from 2005 restores twenty-two minutes and changes the score, and is the better film by a distance. The rating here reflects the version most people have seen.
Coppola made it after a letter from a school librarian and her students asking him to, which is documented.
The cast is the most remarkable assembled for a film of this scale, with Dillon, Swayze, Lowe, Estevez, Cruise, Macchio and Howell.
The Complete Novel cut restores about twenty-two minutes and a different score, and is the version that matches the book.
22. Sugar & Spice (2001)
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"A cheerleading squad robs a bank, and it is told as a documentary about them."
Sugar & Spice has a better structure than its reputation. A pregnant head cheerleader organises a bank robbery to support the baby, and the whole thing is framed as a retrospective account delivered to camera by a rival who was not involved.
The framing device is the best thing in it, because the narrator is unreliable, resentful and obviously embellishing, which gives the film a register it otherwise lacks.
It never commits to either the crime picture or the satire, and the film is consequently pleasant rather than sharp.
A cheerleading squad robs a bank to support a pregnant teammate, told as a documentary-style testimony by a rival.
The framing device is the film’s best idea, since the narrator is unreliable and has an obvious motive.
Marley Shelton and Mena Suvari are committed and the film is considerably sharper than the poster implies.
23. Fired Up! (2009)
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"Two football players infiltrate cheer camp, and it is funnier than it has any right to be."
Fired Up! is a minor film that knows exactly what it is, which puts it above several more ambitious entries lower on this list. Will Gluck directed it the year before Easy A and the script is considerably sharper than the premise suggests.
The joke density is unusually high for the genre and the film is aware of its own stupidity without being smug about it, which is a difficult balance.
It does nothing new and does not pretend to, and the cast is committed throughout.
Two football players join cheer camp to meet girls, which is a premise from 1984 executed in 2009.
The film is funnier than it needs to be, largely because the supporting cast were allowed to improvise.
It is genuinely knowledgeable about cheer as a sport, which is the only thing distinguishing it from the cycle it belongs to.
24. The Babysitters (2007)
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"An uncomfortable indie drama that is better than its reputation and never earns its ending."
The Babysitters has a genuine subject and no idea how to conclude it. A high school girl turns a babysitting job into an escort operation among suburban fathers and recruits her friends into it, taking a cut.
The film is unflinching about the exploitation running in both directions, which is more than most films on this subject manage, and Katherine Waterston is very good in an early role.
The last act reaches for a resolution the material does not support, and the film loses its nerve at exactly the point it needed to hold it.
A high school girl turns a babysitting service into an escort operation, which the film treats as a business case study.
John Leguizamo plays the father who starts it, and the film is uncomfortable in ways it does not always control.
David Ross wrote and directed it and the escalation is the strongest element, with the protagonist becoming management.
25. Gridiron Gang (2006)
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"Based on the real Camp Kilpatrick programme, and it follows the template exactly."
Gridiron Gang is competent and entirely predictable, which is the definition of this position on a list. Dwayne Johnson runs a football programme at a juvenile detention facility, based on the real 1990 Camp Kilpatrick scheme and its documentary.
Everything in it happens in the order you expect. The doubters, the first loss, the death, the unity, the final game, and the closing statistics about recidivism.
The underlying story is genuinely remarkable and the film adds nothing to the documentary except stars and a budget.
It is based on a real detention camp football programme and the actual participants appear in footage over the closing credits.
Dwayne Johnson plays it straight and the film is a conventional sports structure applied to an unconventional setting.
The material about what happens to the boys afterward is the strongest part and arrives in the last ten minutes.
26. All Cheerleaders Die (2013)
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"Four cheerleaders resurrected by witchcraft, and the film has four ideas too many."
All Cheerleaders Die is the bottom of this list because it changes what it is about three times and commits to none of them. McKee and Sivertson remade their own earlier short with a larger budget and a supernatural revenge structure.
The opening ten minutes are a found-footage mockumentary, the middle is a high school satire, the back half is supernatural revenge with body-swapping, and the tone ranges from sincere to gleeful to sadistic without transition.
There is a good film somewhere inside it and no version of the edit would find it, because the problem is in the conception rather than the assembly.
Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson remade their own 2001 film, which almost nobody has seen, with a larger budget.
The premise combines a revenge plot, a supernatural resurrection and a comedy about high school hierarchy, and commits to all three.
It is uneven and genuinely unpredictable, which in this cycle is worth more than competence.