The Breakfast Club Review

Structurally this is a play, five characters and a set and a clock, and Hughes shoots it with more patience than his reputation suggests, letting scenes run long and holding on faces through the confession circle. What made it matter in 1985 still lands. The film takes teenage misery at face value rather than as a phase to be corrected, and the moment Brian explains the lamp is the reason a whole genre exists. Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy are both very good, Anthony Michael Hall is the most natural performer in the room, and Paul Gleason plays the vice principal as a man who has become the thing he despises.

The failures are exactly where you would expect. Bender's harassment of Claire is framed as flirtation and rewarded with a kiss, and Allison is fixed by a makeover that strips out everything interesting about her, both endorsed by the movie rather than examined by it. Those choices sit badly and cannot be argued away. The library scenes remain the best writing Hughes ever did about being fifteen and certain nobody is listening.