Forty years later, John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club remains the quintessential teen movie. It’s funny, heartfelt, wonderfully acted, and above all, it avoids rehashing the same familiar formula we’ve seen a million times (a formula that, at the time, was still being formulated). The Breakfast Club is a deconstruction of the tropes that Hughes helped to create, almost like a high school version of Six Characters in Search of an Author .

Hughes’ inspired screenplay takes five archetypal stock characters who would normally stick to their cliques and never interact with one another — a jock, a nerd, a rebel, a goth, and the prom queen — and forces them all to get to know each other as they spend a Saturday in detention together, and find that they’re not so different after all. They

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