The Breakfast Club: Critic Reviews

Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone.

In nine hours of threatening, bickering and, eventually, poignant (but never maudlin) self-revelation, the stereotypes dissolve and re-form.

The Breakfast Club doesn't need earthshaking revelations; it's about kids who grow willing to talk to one another, and it has a surprisingly good ear for the way they speak.

John Hughes's 1985 film seems meant to explain 80s youngsters to yesterday's youth, and comes to the comforting conclusion that they're just as alienated, idealistic, and vulnerable as the baby boomers of the 1960s.

Does director John Hughes really believe, as he writes here, that 'when you grow up, your heart dies.' It may. But not unless the brain has already started to rot with films like this.

In The Breakfast Club, Hughes has created a surprisingly enduring motion picture that is still effective 13 years after its theatrical debut.

There's not a single false beat to be found, concluding Breakfast with a singular display of emotional discharge unheard of in its genre.

Time capsule.

One of the few teen-oriented films that truly addresses the troubles of its characters, yet it falters in dealing with the issues raised.

Good and bad, it's still the definitive '80s teen movie.

An iconic movie of the '80s, with all the unappealing baggage that suggests.

The Breakfast Club was teen-auteur John Hughes' attempt to take a step back and evaluate the large horde of teens our schools turn out and how they desperately search for identity.

Equal parts funny, smart and sincere, it's a movie that delved a little deeper into the teenage psyche and came back with something more challenging than "nerds want sex."

Teen comedy-drama, over easy.

Anyone who has ever been to high school can relate to at least one of these kids.

...Hughes may have been the first filmmaker to attempt to put plausible teenagers on screen

One of the best films ever made...I mean it!

Offers a breakthrough portrait of the pain and miunderstanding which result from demeaning social hierarchies set up by teenagers.

comedy and truth and great tunes