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Writer: John Hughes

John Hughes wrote and often directed the films that defined American adolescence on screen in the 1980s: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful.

The Breakfast Club is the argument in its purest form: five teenagers in a room for a day, with the adult world present only as an antagonist. Hughes took the interior life of a sixteen-year-old seriously at a point when studio comedy did not.

He also wrote Home Alone and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, then withdrew from public life almost entirely in the 1990s while continuing to write under a pseudonym.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) film posterJohn Hughes

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

Chechik's 1989 American comedy depicting Clark Griswold's plans for a perfect family Christmas at his suburban Chicago home, which unravel through extended-family chaos, holiday catastrophe, and a frozen pool that becomes the screenplay's central comic obsession. Christmas Vacation is the…

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Home Alone (1990) film posterJohn Hughes

Home Alone (1990) Review

Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci fresh off Goodfellas, and Three Stooges traps wrapped around a John Hughes Christmas movie about loneliness. The film holds up better than it has any right to, given that it is essentially Three Stooges slapstick crossed…

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