Martin Scorsese? The Godfather of gangster films. Stephen Spielberg? The patron saint of the summer blockbuster. John Hughes? The unmistakable king of coming-of-age movies. Just look at that filmography: The Breakfast Club. Sixteen Candles. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. How many sun-kissed final summers, high school heartbreaks, and Simple Minds songs can you pack into one guy's cinematic universe? A whole cafeteria's worth, apparently.
Perhaps it's a product of nostalgia for a long-lost time wherein life wasn't bound up in the vice grip of adult responsibility, perhaps it's just that we love watching the darned kids doing the silliest things, but the coming-of-ager is a genre beloved like few others. A lot of the love harks back to Hughes, sure, but what about the rest? It didn't start, nor did it finish, with five teens in a detention hall. There's a buffet of bildungsromans out there — so many so that we already did an extensive list of the outwardly LGBTQ+ ones.
Here, then, are ten of our favourite coming-of-age movies not directed by Hughes, because honestly his aforementioned titles would probably be our top three, and that's a little boring. Following this logic, we've also tried to pick one movie per director. So don't come at us for not listing Boyhood, or School of Rock (which is at least coming-of-age-adjacent). No spoilers, obvs, but Linklater gets his fair share.
10. Rushmore (1999)
Wes Anderson's sophomore pic centres on a precocious brat, portrayed by a baby-faced Jason Schwartzman in his film debut, who takes up a surprising friendship with Bill Murray. He spends the vast majority of his time being annoying, as well as being very good at a wide array of extracurricular activities — he's the captain of the chess club, the comedy club, whatever other club the prestigious Rushmore academy offers. His life is torn asunder, then, when he's expelled for being crap in class. It's typical Anderson that this, a story about a very irritating and pretentious child, ends up a moving portrait of a kid we've misunderstood.
9. Stand by Me (1986)
Okay, fine, there's a prototypical coming-of-ager not directed by Hughes, and that's obviously Stand by Me, the Stephen King weeper about a bunch of cornfed boys in the late ‘50s who come upon a corpse, and in doing so become men. Men who’ll never forget that sunny day down at the watering hole. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve,” Richard Dreyfuss famously narrates in the epilogue, about the friends lost to the tumult of adulthood. “Jesus, does anyone?”
8. Maurice (1987)
There's a joke in the recently released gay rom-com Red, White and Royal Blue about English private school boys being really good in bed because they fucked like rabbits as boarders. Given director Matthew Lopez previously wrote The Inheritance, a staged reimagining of E. M. Forster's Howard's End, it stands to reason that the gag not only refers to real-life Etonite proclivities but Forster's other famous book, Maurice, adapted to the screen in '87 by fellow Forster fanatic James Ivory. In it, the titular schoolboy (James Wilby) goes on a very homosexual journey of inner discovery by shagging Hugh Grant in fields and such. A classic of the queer coming-of-ager tradition.
7. The Last Picture Show (1971)
The Last Picture Show is about the curtain coming down on a rural Texas community cinema frequented by two best friends, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (a terrifyingly young Jeff Bridges), as they pass from high school into adulthood. The provincial oil town they grew up in is on the decline, too. It's as much about the fading of adolescent innocence, then, as that of a small-town American way of life unfamiliar in the '70s, let alone today — when everyone shared cups of sugar with their neighbours, gossiped about Janey Wilkinson down the way like their vocal cords were gonna be torn out by evil Communists, and packed the rafters at the local football game like it was a Gaga concert.
6. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
James Dean had just three credited feature-film roles to his name before he died in a terrible car crash. The main thrust of Dean's legacy, though, is owed to Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, the most iconic coming-of-age pic of the Golden Age, which finds Dean's disillusioned young L.A. greaser looking for something exciting to do — be that a death-defying game of motor chicken or a switchblade duel. Many have tried to match up to Dean's simmering smize, those eyes that reach out to you through the annals, but all have failed.
5. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
It's a simple premise, Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Two Pennsylvanian teens, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) and her cousin (Talia Ryder), take a trip into New York. The why is the bit that matters: Autumn is pregnant, and Pennsylvanian state law prevents her from getting an abortion without parental consent, so they head to a Planned Parenthood facility in Brooklyn. So yes, it's about inter-state inequality for women's rights; it's about men forcing themselves, legislatively, into women's decision-making; it's about the loss of young girls' bodily autonomy. All of these things resonate more in the present moment, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court stripped abortion rights across the country, and where in the UK, a mother can be imprisoned for taking abortion pills. The searing power of Hittman's film is that all of this goes unspoken, because it doesn't need to be said.
4. Dazed and Confused (1993)
Inspiring every single boy at uni I knew to announce their presence at pre-drinks with a shrill “alright, alright, alriiiiight”, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused lives long in the memory. While there has to be an honorary mention for Linklater's critically beloved Boyhood here, an entirely different film in terms of its grander scope, but an immeasurable technical achievement for having been shot across (literal) decades, Dazed pips it. An affectionate high school portrait which might not identically resemble the modern world — in my experience, there was less Alice Cooper, and more Katy Perry — but resonates nevertheless for its universalities. Boys being smelly, boastful boys! The nerd/jock dichotomy! The liberation of knowing that you have everything, or so you hope, still to come.
3. Mean Girls (2004)
The most endlessly quotable high school movie of all time, period. Lives were changed — specifically the lives of Millennial gay men, and women. There isn't a huge amount of plot, it's basically what it says on the tin — Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried being unfathomably cruel to one another, while Amy Poehler tries fruitlessly to roll back the years as the Cool Mum — and that's what we love about it. It does tap into something timelessly true that other coming-of-agers have been traditionally averse to: just how evil teenagers, not least teen girls, are to one another. Points for realism!
2. The Graduate (1967)
Dustin Hoffman is caught up in a web of ambivalent inertia and Mrs. Robinson's pantyhose in Mike Nichols' The Graduate, which has been devastatingly relatable since it first premiered in the late ‘60s. Its Simon & Garfunkel scored opening scene has been endlessly referenced and parodied, by The Simpsons and Quentin Tarantino (see: Jackie Brown) alike: Hoffman stood on an automatic walkway, going everywhere and nowhere, towards an uncertain future that will lead him to Anne Bancroft’s legs and, eventually, the back of a bus with absconding bride Elaine (Katherine Ross), where the cycle resets.
1. Raw (2016) & Titane (2021)
We're making an exception to the “film-per-filmmaker” rule, here, because director Julia Ducournau's two feature films to date should be considered together. The young anti-hero of Raw is a vegetarian girl who discovers a taste for flesh, eventually human flesh; Titane's central subject is a psychopathic young serial killer with a large cochlear implant who becomes pregnant to a car. You can appreciate, then, why Ducournau has been lazily labelled a “provocateur” or “body horror extremist,” or compared to the likes of David Cronenberg or Gaspar Noé, even if to do so only scratches the surface of her corporeal curiosities.
She is a richly empathetic filmmaker who uses her works to get into the weirdness of growing up. Or more pertinently, growing into, and exploring our bodies: our queasy metamorphosis, the bulging of muscles and sprouting of hair and warts, strange smells and sticky residues escaping our bodies. Titane, especially, zooms in on how we witness these changes within ourselves, and how we wrestle with our bodies way beyond adolescence, and adulthood — right to the grave.