Listen On
Five high school students — a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal — serve a Saturday detention together and discover they have more in common than their social labels suggest. John Hughes's most enduring film is deceptively simple: a chamber piece set almost entirely in a single library room. But its Criterion Collection status argues that it is also something more — a document of American adolescence, a study in class and performance, and a film that refuses the easy resolutions it appears to promise.
A film critic and writer specializing in American cinema of the 1980s, Ciara Moloney brings a sharp analytical lens to Hughes's teen classic and its place in the Criterion canon.
Spoiler-free context and starting points.