Top 10 High School Movies

10. Ferris Bueller's Day Off - 1986
Who didnt want to be Ferris in 12th grade? Who wouldn't want school to be a magical place where you could wake up and call in sick (with an awesome hacking-cough keyboard) and then see your name in a get-well-soon message painted on the side of a water tower by lunch, all while you were cruising through Chicago in a red Ferari? Thanks to Matthew Broderick as Ferris, teenagerdom has never felt more fun or mythic.

9. Election - 1999
Before taking on gezers (About Schmidt) and oenophiles (Sideways), director Alexander Payne in Election scabrously exposed the most embarrassing shortcomings of high schoolers in an artful, hilarious way. He doesn't go easy on anybody — not Mathew Broderick's weak, meddling teacher, nor Reese Witherspoon's Fargo-accented student-council-president candidate. In fact, Election is as mean as high school at its worst.

8. Boys N the Hood - 1991
Set in South Central Los Angeles, John Singleton's Oscar-nominated directorial debut revealed what it's like to come of age — and cram for the SATs — in a community plagued by crime, violence, and gang warfare. By contrasting the collegiate aspirations of bookworm Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and footbal star Ricky Baker (Morris Chestnut) with the self-destructive lifestyle of dropout/drug dealer Doughboy (Ice Cube), Boyz effectively pimped for education.

7. Clueless - 1995
It's a rare movie that makes you want to befriend the pretiest, most popular girl in school. But not all girls are Cher (Alicia Silverstone), who gets as many killer lines as fashion ensembles, learns that seeing the best in others is a way to better yourself, and discovers the joy of shopping with a well-dressed gay man — all at the ripe age of 16. Credit writer-director Amy Heckerling for making this modern-day Emma consistently smart and funny.

6. American Graffiti - 1973
Graffitis cast of teens — including Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard — has serious decisions to make on a late-summer night filled with rock music and hot rods, the kind that can only be made if they stay up 'til dawn. Should they ditch town for college? Should they stay with their gals? Whatever the choice, it infuses this most innocently joyous eve-of-adulthood film with that bittersweet feeling of leaving one's childhod behind.

5. Heathers - 1989
For those who dream about offing an obnoxious classmate, Heathers is the ultimate fantasy. Full of mordant wit, shocking violence, and savvy performances by Christian Slater and Winona Ryder, the flick was the antithesi of the earnest '80s John Hughes films — you'd never see Molly Ringwald serving up a kitchen-cleaner cocktail for Ally Sheedy. Even today, Heathers' spin on cliques, teen suicide, and homosexualitty still has bite.

4. Rebel Without a Cause - 1955
''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 refreshin change from the well-scrubbed teens of earlier Hollywood films. Here was a character young audiences could finally recognize.

3. Dazed and Confused - 1993
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 ageles. 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.

2. Fast Times at Ridgemont High - 1982
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 of with a stick. He returned with 24-karat truth. To watch Fast Times today is to know exactly what it felt like to be fixated on sex, drugs, and rock & roll in Southern California circa 1982. It also launched careers and dished out still-relevant life lessons: Jennifer Jason Leigh (relax your throat muscles when fellating a carrot), Phoebe Cates (always knock before entering a bathroom), and Judge Reinhold. And Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli, with his checkerboard Vans and bong hit grin, was a geyser of catchphrases (''Aloha, Mr. Hand!''). The film never strains for coming-of-age treacle. Maybe that's why it still feels so...right. Especially Damone's sage advice: ''When it comes down to making out, whenever possible put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV.''

1. The Breakfast Club - 1985
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 listles loitering in parking lots — as well as any scenes that actually take place during school. But if hell is other people — and high school is hell — then John Hughes is the genre's Sartre, and this is his No Exit. The concept is simple: one Saturday detention, five unhappy teens, and their scramble to prove they're each something more than a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), an athlete (Emilio Estevez), a basket case (Ally Sheedy), a princess (Molly Ringwald), and a criminal (Judd Nelson). Following the farcical fluff of Sixteen Candles, the issues Hughes explored — sex, drugs, abuse, suicide, the need to belong to something — were surprisingly subversive and handled with bracing, R-rated honesty. '''Kids movie' was a derogatory term,'' recalls Nelson, ''and Hughes was definitely not making that.'' Thus, 21 years later, the film still sparks intense debates about the trials of teen life. (Sheedy's goth freak gets a makeover, then gets the guy: well-earned happy ending or antifeminist propaganda? Discus!). Never mind the serious sociological stuff. The Breakfast Club rules because watching the group dismantle/ignore the authority of Principal ''Dick'' Vernon (Paul Gleason) is a vicarios thrill at any age. It rules because Simple Minds' ''Don't You Forget About Me'' is a kick-ass theme. Mostly it rules because, as Hall puts it: ''In the end, you learn maybe we're more alike than we realize, and that's kind of cool.'' Leave it to the neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie to get all cheesy.