TimeOut's Youth Gone Wild!
TimeOut magazine published a list of the 50 greatest films about wayward children. Their intro: Even the most helicoptering Park Slope parent will admit that some children, adorable though they are, must simply be born bad. Not their children, of course. But these other barbaric youngsters—rebellious, foul-mouthed, sometimes just pure evil—always make it to movie screens, from James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause to the NYC hellspawn of Kids(and all manner of demonically possessed tykes in between). Time Out New York has collected the most shocking of these movies about youth and rebellion and ranked them in a countdown of atrocious behavior. Our only parameter: They must be teens and younger, not twentysomethings.
The top 35 highest-rated (on IMDb) of these films are listed below. Which best captures the spirit of youth rebellion?
Discuss the list here
Note: all text describing the films accompanied the original TimeOut article
The top 35 highest-rated (on IMDb) of these films are listed below. Which best captures the spirit of youth rebellion?
Discuss the list here
Note: all text describing the films accompanied the original TimeOut article
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35 titles
- DirectorGary RossStarsJennifer LawrenceJosh HutchersonLiam HemsworthKatniss Everdeen voluntarily takes her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games: a televised competition in which two teenagers from each of the twelve Districts of Panem are chosen at random to fight to the death.#49 - As winning as Jennifer Lawrence is with that bow and arrow, remember that this movie is about kids fighting a gladiatorial battle to the death. Stabbings, slicings and cliquish pack hunting are the activities of a futuristic breed of youth, so desperate for survival that common mercy falls by the wayside.
- DirectorFrancis Ford CoppolaStarsMatt DillonMickey RourkeDiane LaneAbsent-minded street thug Rusty James struggles to live up to his legendary older brother's reputation, and longs for the days of gang warfare.#48 - Francis Ford Coppola’s dreamy b&w teen drama centers on a pair of delinquent brothers (Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke) for whom knife fights and motorcycle riding are the norm. Makes perfect sense, considering their dad is played by easy rider Dennis Hopper.
- DirectorGore VerbinskiStarsNaomi WattsMartin HendersonBrian CoxA journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape which seems to cause the death of anyone one week to the day after they view it.#47 - The 1998 Japanese original triggered a wave of evil-technology movies—this was the one about a haunted videocassette that kills you. When Hollywood got around to its unusually excellent remake, the true villain was in our face: ropy-haired Samara (Daveigh Chase), an abused child drowned in a well, intent on ghostly revenge.
- DirectorWilliam WylerStarsSylvia SidneyJoel McCreaHumphrey BogartThe lives of a young man, a young woman, an notorious gangster, and a group of street kids converge one day in a volatile New York City slum.#46 - The famous fictional gang the Dead End Kids had their first outing in a 1934 stage play, but it was William Wyler’s film version that turned them into the standard-bearers for screen delinquents, whatever names they’d go by over the years (the Bowery Boys, the Little Tough Guys).
- DirectorNoel BlackStarsAnthony PerkinsTuesday WeldBeverly GarlandWhen a mentally-disturbed young man tells a pretty girl that he's a secret agent, she believes him; murder and mayhem ensue.#45 - Given his onscreen past, you’d be forgiven for thinking Anthony Perkins’s mental-institution parolee was this comic thriller’s psycho protagonist. But the real crazy turns out to be Tuesday Weld’s beaming high-schooler, who manipulates her fragile new friend to achieve shockingly murderous goals.
- DirectorWilliam A. WellmanStarsFrankie DarroRochelle HudsonEdwin PhillipsIn the depths of the Depression, two teenage boys strike out on their own in order to help their struggling parents and find life on the road tougher than expected.#42 - Not content to simply belch out a typical Warner Bros. social drama, William A. Wellman went the extra mile with this landmark tale of Depression kids who take up the hobo life—and didn’t flinch from showing these tough youngsters losing limbs, stealing food, and mixing it up with railroad cops and everyday citizens.
- DirectorMichael HanekeStarsArno FrischAngela WinklerUlrich MüheA 14-year-old video enthusiast obsessed with violent films decides to make one of his own and show it to his parents, with tragic results.#41 - Long before Michael Haneke concocted the ultimate naughty-little-fascists tale, The White Ribbon (2009), the Austrian filmmaker made this movie about a 14-year-old who murders another kid—and films the whole thing for posterity. Haneke’s clinical take on how media desensitization creates underage monsters makes this torn-from-the-headlines drama that much more disturbing.
- DirectorMatthew VaughnStarsAaron Taylor-JohnsonNicolas CageChloë Grace MoretzDave Lizewski is an unnoticed high school student and comic book fan who one day decides to become a superhero, even though he has no powers, training or meaningful reason to do so.#39 - Most superheroes have a tinge of arrested development to them, with their tights and jumping around and stuff. But this comics-based action movie makes that connection uncomfortably explicit with the character of Hit-Girl (Chloë Grace Moretz), a foulmouthed 11-year-old who gleefully wastes henchmen with the best of them
- DirectorJohn SingletonStarsCuba Gooding Jr.Laurence FishburneHudhail Al-AmirFollows the lives of three young males living in the Crenshaw ghetto of Los Angeles, dissecting questions of race, relationships, violence, and future prospects.#38 - John Singleton’s feature debut dives headfirst into South Central L.A.’s ghetto culture, as best friends Ice Cube and Cuba Gooding Jr. are tempted by the neighborhood’s seedier aspects. Drug deals and drive-bys are the norm—and once one of them goes down the wrong path, you find out how truly unforgiving the streets are.
- DirectorUli EdelStarsNatja BrunckhorstEberhard AurigaPeggy BussieckA teen girl in 1970s Berlin becomes addicted to heroin. Everything in her life slowly begins to distort and disappear as she befriends a small crew of junkies and falls in love with a drug-abusing male prostitute.#35 - What’s a dour West Berlin 12-year-old to do, in all her fashionable ennui, but start going to nightclubs, become a raging heroin addict and fall into the sex trade? A cult movie of frightening honesty (and with a David Bowie cameo, playing himself), this drama pays unflinching attention to the paraphernalia of needles, scarring and bodily waste.
- DirectorJerome RobbinsRobert WiseStarsNatalie WoodGeorge ChakirisRichard BeymerTwo youngsters from rival New York City gangs fall in love, but tensions between their respective friends build toward tragedy.#33 - Rival teenage street gangs go head-to-head in Manhattan, hurling insults, slashing switchblades, and…singing songs! This epic film version of the massively influential Broadway musical meshes dance and destruction with heartrending mastery.
- DirectorNarciso Ibáñez SerradorStarsLewis FianderPrunella RansomeAntonio IranzoA couple of English tourists arrive on an island where all the children have gone crazy and are murdering the adults.#30 - If our countdown teaches you anything, please let it be that even the most innocent among us can’t be trusted. A low-budget thriller from Spain, this unforgettable bit of nonsense has a vacationing Brit and his pregnant wife chased by an island full of sullen, vicious children. The rest of the adults are mysteriously gone.
- DirectorStanley KubrickStarsJames MasonShelley WintersSue LyonA middle-aged college professor becomes infatuated with a 14-year-old girl.#29 - A nymphet (Sue Lyon) seduces a stuffy old college professor (James Mason), with ruinous results, in Stanley Kubrick’s blackly humorous adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s incendiary novel. Not even vulgarian mom Shelley Winters is safe from this wily, gum-snapping adolescent’s destructive tendencies.
- DirectorHector BabencoStarsFernando Ramos da SilvaJorge JuliãoGilberto MouraThe life of a boy on the streets of Sao Paulo, involved with crimes, prostitution, and drugs.#28 - Hector Babenco’s drama about a ten-year-old favela criminal is one unsparing character study: This baby-faced boy who becomes a pimp, pusher and killer represents every Brazilian slum kid hardened by street life. Tragically, lead actor Fernando Ramos da Silva would be gunned down by the police at age 19.
- DirectorRichard DonnerStarsGregory PeckLee RemickHarvey StephensMysterious deaths surround an American ambassador. Could the child that he is raising actually be the Antichrist? The Devil's own son?#27 - Every child has a bit of the devil in him, but Damien (Harvey Stephens), the grave young protagonist of this deliciously sanguine horror film, has more than most. Accordingly, the people around him drop like flies, whether by hanging, impaling or, most memorably, decapitation by glass.
- DirectorPenelope SpheerisStarsEugene TatuAlice Bag BandBlack FlagA look into the Los Angeles punk rock scene, that was largely ignored by the rock music press of the time.#26 - Anyone unfamiliar with L.A.’s hardcore punk scene should take a look at Penelope Spheeris’s definitive documentary: As crowds of underage concertgoers violently riot to Black Flag, X and Fear, you understand the moment when out-of-control adolescent anger found its ideal soundtrack
- DirectorLynne RamsayStarsTilda SwintonJohn C. ReillyEzra MillerKevin's mother struggles to love her strange child despite the increasingly dangerous things he says and does as he grows up. But Kevin is just getting started, and his final act will be beyond anything anyone imagined.#25 - Anchored by the frayed memories of a guilt-ridden mother (showstopping Tilda Swinton), this suburban tragedy chronicles the growing willfulness of a dark-haired boy, who matures from messy preteen intractability into an intense high-school predator. Some kids shouldn’t be trusted with archery.
- DirectorFrancis Ford CoppolaStarsC. Thomas HowellMatt DillonRalph MacchioIn a small Oklahoma town in 1964, the rivalry between two gangs, the poor Greasers and the rich Socs, heats up when one gang member accidentally kills a member of the other.#24 - It’s a blissful life of posturing machismo and constant rumbles for the Greasers, Oklahoman delinquents who run wild in Francis Ford Coppola’s visually bold adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s teen-lit classic. An accidental stabbing brings a hard dose of reality to the punkish fun and games.
- DirectorBrian De PalmaStarsSissy SpacekPiper LaurieAmy IrvingCarrie White, a shy, friendless teenage girl who is sheltered by her domineering, religious mother, unleashes her telekinetic powers after being humiliated by her classmates at her senior prom.#20 - She’s shy, an easy target for bullies and secretly psychic. But high-school pariah Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) can be pushed only so far before she telekinetically throws her peers’ cruelty back at them. Brian De Palma’s lurid horror film appeals to all those vengeful adolescent feelings we’re taught to keep in check.
- DirectorKinji FukasakuStarsTatsuya FujiwaraAki MaedaTarô YamamotoIn the future, the Japanese government captures a class of ninth-grade students and forces them to kill one another under the revolutionary "Battle Royale" act.#19 - Kinji Fukasaku’s gloriously gory action film takes the concept of academic competitiveness to another level: Students must participate in a government-sponsored game that requires them to kill their fellow pupils or go home in a body bag. Not surprisingly, the sight of uniformed kid-on-kid violence earned the film both angry op-ed pieces and pop-cult status in its home country.
- DirectorRichard BrooksStarsGlenn FordAnne FrancisLouis CalhernA new English teacher at a violent, unruly inner-city school is determined to do his job, despite resistance from both students and faculty.#18 - The rise of juvenile delinquency was a hot topic in the ’50s, and this story about a teacher facing down a multiracial gang of troubled, knife-wielding kids (including Vic Morrow, Sidney Poitier and…Jamie Farr?) was the first to cash in on the trend. Throw in some rock music and voilà: A genre was born.
- DirectorPeter JacksonStarsMelanie LynskeyKate WinsletSarah PeirseTwo teenage girls share a unique bond; their parents, concerned that the friendship is too intense, separate them, and the girls take revenge.#15 - A staggering film from a director who would go on to bigger (though arguably not better) things, Peter Jackson’s drama takes its cue from the real-life story of two New Zealand teens who killed one of their mothers. As played by up-and-comers Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, the girls are maniacally in love and lost in fantasy.
- DirectorMervyn LeRoyStarsNancy KellyPatty McCormackGage ClarkeRhoda Penmark seems like your average, sweet eight-year-old girl. After her rival at school dies in mysterious circumstances at the school picnic, her mother starts to suspect that Rhoda was responsible.#14 - Eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) is the most adorable pigtailed moppet in her small town. But this teacher’s pet turns out to have more than a few malicious desires (quite a coincidence that her schoolyard rival was found facedown in a lake), and no one—child or adult—is safe. This cheeky thriller helped pave the way for almost every psycho-kid movie to follow.
- DirectorMichael LehmannStarsWinona RyderChristian SlaterShannen DohertyAt Westerburg High where cliques rule, jocks dominate and all the popular girls are named Heather, it's going to take a Veronica and mysterious new kid to give teen angst a body count.#13 - Generation X was perfectly pegged in this vicious comedy about two outsiders, a Nicholsonian loner (Christian Slater) and an appeaser (Winona Ryder), who wage war on the cool kids via poisonous drain cleaner, slander and bullets. The final sequence, staged around a bomb plot at a pep rally, is still disturbing.
- DirectorFrançois TruffautStarsJean-Pierre LéaudAlbert RémyClaire MaurierA young boy, left without attention, delves into a life of petty crime.#12 - François Truffaut’s influential, semiautobiographical debut feature introduced the world to Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a troubled youth as adept at stealing and swearing as he is at forever antagonizing his adult guardians. (Pawning his father’s typewriter is the final straw—he’s taken to jail for a night.) Few films have captured rugged adolescent experience with such clear-eyed compassion.
- DirectorWolf RillaStarsGeorge SandersBarbara ShelleyMartin StephensIn the English village of Midwich, the blonde-haired, glowing-eyed children of uncertain paternity prove to have frightening powers.#11 - There are creepy blond kids, and then there’s the pale, towheaded army of telepathic mutants that make this British sci-fi classic such an unnerving pleasure. Once these glowing-eyed prepubescents force the town’s elders to purposefully crash their cars and shoot themselves in the head, not even a group time-out can keep them from potential world domination.
- DirectorGus Van SantStarsElias McConnellAlex FrostEric DeulenSeveral ordinary high school students go through their daily routine as two others prepare for something more malevolent.#10 - Everyone was looking for answers after the 1999 Columbine school shooting. In his moody, mesmerizing take on the event, writer-director Gus Van Sant eschews pat explanations, opting instead for elliptical immersion. The film unfolds from several different vantage points, shifting enigmatically between victims and killers, observers and participants. Well-adjusted kids mingle with the bullied and the bulimic. (Actions as diverse as a casually thrown spitball or an anorexics’ vomiting session are presented with a self-same etherealness that is chilling.) And even after the guns come out, the brutality remains queasily banal. No moralistic judgment is passed on what we see. The true horror comes in reflecting on Van Sant’s Inferno-like depiction of youth at its most vulnerable and volatile.
- DirectorJonathan KaplanStarsMatt DillonMichael Eric KramerPamela LudwigA group of bored teenagers rebel against authority in the community of New Granada after the death of one of their own.#9 - With the exception of feral, feather-haired Matt Dillon (making his screen debut), the kids in Jonathan Kaplan’s youthsploitation flick don’t start out as bad seeds. They’re just restless suburban adolescents stuck in a planned community, policed by a petty-tyrant cop and treated as pariahs by adults. Of course, these put-upon kids will get pushed past their breaking points and use a PTA meeting to show their persecutors who really runs things. Based on an actual incident in Foster City, California, this story of underage revolt served as a warning to parents: Treat the children well or you’ll pay the price. Kurt Cobain claimed that the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was directly inspired by this movie’s climax, and the act of school vandalism that ends the tale is delivered with a cathartic ferocity that remains shocking.
- DirectorWilliam FriedkinStarsEllen BurstynMax von SydowLinda BlairWhen a young girl is possessed by a mysterious entity, her mother seeks the help of two Catholic priests to save her life.#8 - Demonic possession was never more shocking than in this powerhouse, a fear film that turned an innocent 12-year-old girl into a roiling, bed-bound monster. The evil is supernatural, but step away from the original context and William Friedkin’s movie, based on the 1971 best-seller by William Peter Blatty, is even more subversive: an oblique, deeply conservative comment on a younger generation’s unruliness. These kids swear, they disrespect their parents, they vomit all over us, and they abandon law, order and God. Can’t the power of Christ compel them to at least get a haircut? Regan (Linda Blair) is nothing less than the counterculture on trial, and as with all good horror movies, her story speaks to tensions that were already ruffling households worldwide.
- DirectorLindsay AndersonStarsMalcolm McDowellDavid WoodRichard WarwickIn this allegorical story, a revolution led by pupil Mick Travis takes place at an old established private school in England.#7 - Burning with rage against authority and championed in a season of radical protest, Lindsay Anderson’s fantasy about violent rebellion at an English public school captures the darkest adolescent instincts in a blaze of gunfire. Our hero, Mick (fresh-faced Malcolm McDowell in his screen debut), submits to the humiliations and blood-drawing canings of upperclassmen and master professors. Punishments are ritualized; indeed, the atmosphere of the movie is so thoroughly depressing that your heart leaps into your throat when Mick escapes campus and steals a motorcycle, absconding with a waitress for a fling. The best is yet to come: In a climactic sequence that may be a daydream, the beaten-down students break out a trove of machine guns and take positions on the roof, mowing down parents, teachers and a visiting general. Don’t call the British a repressed people without seeing this wonderfully misbehaved movie.
- DirectorLuis BuñuelStarsAlfonso MejíaRoberto CoboEstela IndaA group of juvenile delinquents live a violent and crime-filled life in the festering slums of Mexico City, as the morals of young Pedro are gradually corrupted and destroyed by the others.#6 - Given carte blanche after directing the popular comedy El Gran Calavera, the great Luis Buñuel turned to the Mexico City slums for his next project. This devastating social-realist tract—spiced throughout with a few imaginative surrealist touches—focuses on a group of young hoodlums who prowl the ghetto with animal determination. They beat up a blind musician, punch an amputee, and the vicious leader of their gang, Jaibo, rules over all with an iron fist. But then Jaibo’s ambivalent right-hand boy, Pedro, rebels, and things go from very bad to much, much worse. The film is unflinching in its presentation of these outcasts’ grim existence, and hypercritical of the surrounding society that would toss them onto the trash heap.
- DirectorAlan ClarkeStarsRay WinstoneMick FordJulian FirthAn uncompromising story of life in a British juvenile offender institution in the '70s.#5 - British director Alan Clarke’s gritty look at life inside a U.K. youth detention center courted plenty of controversy for its graphic, nonchalant depictions of violence. No one is innocent—not the boys who engage in bullying and frequent beatdowns, nor the wardens who are often as cruel as the troubled youths they’re supposed to be watching over. A charismatic Ray Winstone memorably portrays the tough-as-nails protagonist who initially wants to keep a low profile, but eventually ascends to the top of the borstal hierarchy by assaulting a fellow inmate. Clarke’s indictment of this corrupt rehabilitative system—with its preponderance of racism, rape and murder—is an eye-opening exposé about the corruptibility of the young.
- DirectorNicholas RayStarsJames DeanNatalie WoodSal MineoA rebellious young man with a troubled past comes to a new town, finding friends and enemies.#4 - By the time this tale of disaffected teens was released in October 1955, it had been beaten to the punch by The Blackboard Jungle and James Dean was dead. But it was Nicholas Ray’s movie that posthumously made Dean a star and, more importantly, gave youth defiance its first poster boy. Though it’s full of antisocial acting out, switchblade fights and hot-rod games of chicken, Rebel actually lays the blame at the feet of parental misguidance. These kids are bad because they’re misunderstood by an adult world ill-equipped to meet their needs, and thanks to the sensitive portrayals from Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and Dean, you could almost believe it’s true. Dean’s insolent pose would launch a thousand moody tough guys; the movie would help kick-start a youth revolution.
- DirectorJean VigoStarsJean DastéRobert le FlonLouis LefebvreIn a repressive boarding school with rigid rules of behavior, four boys decide to rebel against the direction on a celebration day.#2 - The French director and artist Jean Vigo was at a low point in his career when a rich businessman agreed to finance his semiautobiographical tale of four rebellious boys at boarding school. What resulted was anarchy in its purest form: This 41-minute wonder feels timeless in its presentation of disobedience, perhaps because it embraces childhood’s quotidian and fanciful aspects with equal fervor. You get as much of a charge out of a boy talking back to his teacher as you do the students’ exhilarating, storm-the-barricades uprising, in which the patronizing adults (who Vigo brilliantly caricatures as stiff-backed, overweight or dwarfish tyrants) are tied up, pelted with sticks and driven into hiding as the children come to power. Though it now seems to occur in some nebulously ideal dreamworld, the film was banned by the French Ministry of the Interior, fearful of the dissidence it might incite. Vigo died of tuberculosis shortly after, but his defiance lived on: François Truffaut cited Zero as a major influence on his own tale of troubled adolescence, The Four Hundred Blows.
- DirectorStanley KubrickStarsMalcolm McDowellPatrick MageeMichael BatesIn the future, a sadistic gang leader is imprisoned and volunteers for a conduct-aversion experiment, but it doesn't go as planned.#1 - His name is Alex and his hobbies are rape, home invasions and a bit of the old ultraviolence. Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, about a dystopic Britain overrun with rampaging teens, used extreme behavior to examine freewill. So does Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation—but not before turning Alex into a cinematic icon and stylizing his gang’s criminal activities in the most impossibly exciting, epically irresponsible manner. The result directly influenced the aesthetics of punk and was eventually withdrawn from circulation in the U.K by the director himself. But what makes A Clockwork Orange such an exemplary kids-run-wild film is the way it distills youth culture’s low points—from mods-versus-rockers rumbling to Manson-family terrorizing—into one nightmarish worst-case scenario and then forces you to share in the rush. No other movie has made youthful immorality seem so dangerously wanton, even as it criticized a society that could produce such a scourge. Thanks to a master filmmaker and his charismatic lead, the vicarious thrill of wallowing in Alex’s bad behavior still has the power to awaken the inner droog in all of us—whether we like it or not.