Reel Lessons for Real Life: Movies Your Teen Shouldn’t Miss

Cinematic gems for adolescent minds

Adolescence can be a complex phase. As teenagers leave childhood behind, they go through significant physical, psychological, and cognitive changes. In particular, adolescents begin to develop their unique personalities. As a result, they seek more independence from their family. In other words, they try to find their own path and role in life. As teenagers prepare to enter adulthood, they also start to form personal opinions on the world they live in and question societal norms and rules.

Psychologists explain that the many challenges of adolescence can often lead to confusion and emotional turmoil. For this reason, many teenagers seek guidance from role models. According to experts, these figures are fundamental to development. They often inspire, motivate, and give directions. In this sense, movies can help teens find positive role models to emulate. They also allow them to see the world from different perspectives and discover other realities. Additionally, movies help parents to open up conversations on complex topics, such as grief, exploitation, or the perils of hate.

Here are four movies that every teen should watch.

Billy Elliot

Directed by Stephen Daldry, this 2000 movie tells the story of Billy, a boy living in County Durham during the 1984–85 English coal miners strike. Though his father enrolls him in a boxing class, Billy soon discovers a passion for dancing and secretly starts taking ballet lessons. Mrs. Wilkinson, his cynical yet funny teacher, is impressed by Billy’s talent and encourages him to audition for the prestigious Royal Ballet School. Because of its worldwide success, the movie has been adapted as a novel by Melvin Burgess and a West End musical. Jamie Bell, who played the protagonist, won a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

The movie’s main themes are acceptance and overcoming prejudices. Though Billy loves dancing, he’s aware that the male adults in his life associate male ballet dancers with homosexuality. He also inherently perceives that society disapproves of gay people. At the same time, Billy begins to understand that societal ideas about manliness can be wrong and suffocating. He aspires to become a ballet dancer but identifies as straight. However, he still feels compelled to reaffirm his “manliness.” When his father discovers his passion, Billy has to remind him that ballet dancers can be as physically strong as athletes. Similarly, when his best friend Michael timidly comes out to him, he readily accepts him. At the same time, he reiterates that he’s straight.

Billy perfectly incarnates the confusion experienced by teens as they start to question the norms of society. While they may feel pressured to adhere to them, they also sense that there are other ways to view the world. Billy Elliot can also help parents understand the struggle and discrimination their teens may face as they follow their passions. In the movie, Billy’s father and older brother ultimately accept Billy and actively support him. Watching his father cry and catch his breath as an older Billy performs in The Swan Lake is a moving moment. In an article on GQ, Jaya Saxena writes that the 2000 movie is still relevant today: “that boys still need to be reminded that liking ballet doesn’t have any bearing on their sexual orientation feels like a sad truth.”

Billy Elliot also shows how children and teens from low socioeconomic backgrounds need to overcome several barriers to realize their aspirations. For Billy, ballet is a way to evade the bleak future he seems destined to. “They said I could have been a professional dancer if I’d had the training,” repeatedly says his grandmother. In the end, Billy’s family and his community identify with him and his aspirations. In a touching scene, the struggling miners start to collect money to help cover the cost of Billy’s and his father’s bus tickets to London. In this sense, the movie encourages teens to fight hard for their dreams, regardless of their circumstances.

Super 8

In this J.J. Abrams movie, 14-year-old Joe loses his mother in a terrible workplace accident. Four months later, he still struggles with grief while making an amateur zombie movie for a Super 8 film competition. One night, he and his friends witness a horrible train derailment. In the following days, strange things begin to occur in the small town. As general chaos ensues, Joe and his friends eventually discover that the disturbing events are caused by an alien captured and tortured by the U.S. Air Force when it crash-landed on earth.

On the surface, Super 8 is an entertaining, action-packed monster movie. However, it’s fundamentally about “a kid who [is] trying to process the loss of his mother,” as J.J. Abrams explained in an interview with Collider. In this sense, the frightening alien is a metaphor for Joe’s all-encompassing and suffocating grief. At first, the teen can’t come to terms with the sudden loss. Like the zombies in his and his friends’ Super 8 movie, Joe is dead inside. He’s living but not alive.

Throughout the movie, Joe holds onto a locket with a picture of his mother and him as a baby. He grabs it whenever he’s afraid or in danger. As he searches for the dangerous alien, Joe slowly accepts his mother’s death. In an emotional scene, Joe looks the extraterrestrial being in the eyes and says: “bad things happen, but you can still live.” In the ending scene, when the alien leaves on a spaceship, an invisible force pulls the locket out of Joe’s jacket. The teen desperately grasps it, but then he finally lets it go. “He had to just finally be okay with her not being there,” commented J.J. Abrams.

“Grief,” wrote Joan Didion in her famous book The Year of Magical Thinking, “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” While this is undoubtedly true, Super 8 can help teens understand the struggle those who lost a loved one go through. The movie also allows parents to discuss death, loss, and grief. Additionally, Super 8 shows the importance of familial bonds during difficult times. In the beginning, Joe and his father are often at odds. Each one is overwhelmed by his pain. However, in the end, as they watch the locket float toward the spaceship, they finally reunite and hug each other.

Lady Bird

Directed by Greta Gerwig, this coming-of-age comedy tells the story of Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson. A quirky and witty senior in a Catholic high school in Sacramento, Christine wants to leave her hometown to study at a liberal arts college in New York. She tries to assert her independence and show her distance from her environment by asking to be addressed with the nickname “Lady Bird.” She often comes into conflict with her equally stubborn mother. A nurse and the breadwinner of her financially struggling family, the mother strongly disapproves of her daughter’s dream of studying so far away from home.

Critics and psychologists have praised the 2017 movie for its realistic portrayal of the relationship between mother and daughter. According to Dr. Miriam Steele, an expert on adult attachment styles, Lady Bird “fully acknowledges the complexity of mother-daughter love, as well as how a parent’s best intentions for her child can be obscured or muddled by poor communication or personal hangups.” After its release, The Cut spoke with seven teenage girls and their mothers who watched the movie together. Interestingly, they all related to the conflicting but ultimately loving relationship between Lady Bird and her mother. Many also stated that the movie helped them become closer and understand each other’s struggles. “The film became part of us,” said one mother, “and we went on with life with a new outlook.”

Though Lady Bird focuses on the relationship between a mother and her teen daughter, the movie is ultimately about the universal clash between teens’ desire for independence and their parents’ sense of abandonment. In this sense, the movie can help seniors and their families navigate that delicate moment between high school and college. “I’ve gotten better at seeing where my mom’s coming from instead of just taking my own view on things,” declared a teen interviewed by The Cut.

The Enola Holmes Saga

The two movies of this saga tell the story of Enola Holmes (EH), an original character created by novelist Nancy Springer in 2006. The younger sister of famous detective Sherlock Holmes, Enola is an independent, quirky, strong, and clever young woman. Homeschooled by her suffragette mother, she wants to become a detective. During her investigations, Enola repeatedly breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the viewers with witty remarks.

Several critics have praised the EH movies for providing a positive and strong role model for young viewers, especially young women. Indeed, Enola teaches them that women don’t have to conform to societal views on femininity to express their gender identity. Similarly, the young detective rebels against the idea that all women should only aspire to become mothers and wives. While the character may be more relatable to female viewers, Enola also teaches young men that there are several different ways for women to explore and express their identities.

Enola also shows young women that they shouldn’t exclusively rely on men. Sherlock’s sister doesn’t seek her brother’s help to face difficult situations. Fiercely independent, Enola is confident in her abilities and strength. In his review on Netflix Tudum, Clint Edwards writes: “The best part, at least for my girls, was when Sherlock Holmes asks Enola if she’d like to be his partner in solving crimes. And what does she do? She turns it down so she can go her own way and not live in her brother’s shadow.”

Finally, the second movie, where Enola investigates the disappearance of a young woman working in a match factory, introduces teens to fundamental themes such as economic exploitation and workers’ rights. In a powerful scene, the movie reproduces the 1888 matchgirls’ strike, when young workers walked out of the Bryant & May factory to protest against poverty wages and dangerous working conditions. The scene allows parents and teens to talk about the many social, economic, and gender inequalities that still exist in contemporary society.