Coming-of-age movies
9 Best Coming-of-Age Movies About Being Young
The best coming-of-age movies we know, from The 400 Blows to Lady Bird and Moonlight: nine films about first friends, first heartbreak and parents.
The best coming-of-age movies are about the years when everything feels urgent. A fight with your mom is the end of the world, one new friend can change your whole personality, and you can feel yourself turning into somebody without knowing who yet. The good ones work whether you're living through it right now or looking back from a safe distance. A lot of them are also very funny.
Our nine span about sixty years, from a Paris schoolboy in the late 1950s to a Sacramento senior counting the days until she can leave and a thirteen-year-old talking to her webcam. None of them treats teenagers as a punchline. None of them ends with a neat lesson, either, which is part of why they last.
My 9 Movies
9 Best Coming-of-Age Movies About Being Young
The nine picks
The 400 Blows
Dir. François Truffaut · 1959
Antoine Doinel is ignored at home, picked on at school and slowly drifting into trouble. François Truffaut's first feature helped start the French New Wave, and you can see why: it's shot on real Paris streets with a camera almost as restless as the boy. Jean-Pierre Léaud went on to play Antoine in four more films over the next twenty years.
- Best for
- Anyone ready to try a black-and-white classic
- When to watch
- A quiet afternoon with subtitles on
The Breakfast Club
Dir. John Hughes · 1985
Five kids who would never sit together at lunch (a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal) serve Saturday detention in the school library. That's the whole setup. John Hughes lets them argue and show off until the defenses start slipping, and a movie that is mostly talk in one room never drags. Every teen ensemble since owes it something.
- Best for
- Anyone who's been put in a box
- When to watch
- A Saturday you have to yourself
Stand by Me
Dir. Rob Reiner · 1986
Summer, 1959. Four boys from a small Oregon town set off along the railroad tracks to find the body of a missing kid. Rob Reiner adapted it from a Stephen King novella, and there's barely a scare in it. What it has is the last summer before friends start to drift apart, plus campfire arguments about what exactly Goofy is that sound just like twelve-year-olds.
- Best for
- People who lost touch with their childhood friends
- When to watch
- A warm late-summer evening
Almost Famous
Dir. Cameron Crowe · 2000
It's 1973, and a fifteen-year-old who writes about music talks his way into a Rolling Stone assignment on tour with a rising band. Cameron Crowe did more or less the same thing as a teenager, and it shows. The film is fond of everybody in it, including the kid's worried mother, played by Frances McDormand, who gets some of the best lines.
- Best for
- Music obsessives and would-be writers
- When to watch
- A road trip with the volume up
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Dir. Stephen Chbosky · 2012
Charlie starts high school with no friends, until two seniors, step-siblings Sam and Patrick, pull him into their world of mixtapes, house parties and midnight Rocky Horror screenings. Stephen Chbosky adapted his own novel and handles Charlie's harder moments with care. The tunnel scene, standing up in the back of a pickup with the music blasting, became shorthand for a whole generation of readers.
- Best for
- Quiet teens and former quiet teens
- When to watch
- A night when you feel a bit on the outside
Boyhood
Dir. Richard Linklater · 2014
Richard Linklater filmed the same cast for a few days each year over twelve years, so you really do watch Mason grow up in Texas, from six to eighteen. There isn't much plot. There are moves, new schools, a camping trip with his dad and a lot of haircuts, and you notice time passing the way you do when you flip through old family photos.
- Best for
- Patient viewers who like everyday detail
- When to watch
- A long evening with nowhere to be
Moonlight
Dir. Barry Jenkins · 2016
Three chapters, three actors, one quiet boy named Chiron growing up in Miami. Barry Jenkins shoots him close, in warm and glowing color, and the three performances line up so well that you stop noticing the handoffs. It won Best Picture. It also has a diner scene near the end that we'd put up against any scene from the last decade.
- Best for
- Fans of quiet, intimate drama
- When to watch
- Late at night, on your own
Lady Bird
Dir. Greta Gerwig · 2017
Christine insists that everyone call her Lady Bird. It's her senior year in Sacramento, in the early 2000s, and she wants out: out of Catholic school, out of her hometown, away from her mother. Greta Gerwig's first solo feature is funny in a quick, specific way. The arguments in the car between mother and daughter are uncomfortably familiar.
- Best for
- Anyone who fights with a parent they love
- When to watch
- Right before you call home
Eighth Grade
Dir. Bo Burnham · 2018
Kayla has one week of middle school left. She spends a lot of it making cheerful advice videos that almost nobody watches. Bo Burnham's first feature gets growing up online painfully right, from the phone glowing in bed to the pool party she dreads. Elsie Fisher never plays Kayla for laughs, which is why the cringe hurts and why you root for her anyway.
- Best for
- Anyone who was online at thirteen
- When to watch
- When you can handle some secondhand embarrassment
Make it yours
Most people have one coming-of-age film that felt like it was secretly about them. Start with our nine in the My 9 movie maker, swap in yours, and share the grid. It'll say more about who you were at sixteen than your yearbook photo ever did.
Opens the maker with these nine in the grid. Swap any of them for your own.