WHS Film Teachers on Best High School Movies to See Before Graduation

By Emily Beaupre and Sara Beaupre '26

The number of movies about high school is astonishing: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” “The Half of It,” “Mean Girls” — and that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

The question is: What are the best movies to see before leaving your high school career behind? Which ones best capture the high school experience?


The thing is, high school’s different for everyone. However, there’s a universal feeling all students get during their last year. That’s the time you realize, this is it. People will go to a college down the street or a university across the ocean. Maybe they’ll join the armed forces, learn a trade, get a job, or take a year to travel. Everyone’s lives will change when they walk across the stage. So in high school, it’s important to take some time to reflect. These are some movies that Wethersfield High School teachers recommend as the movies to watch before you graduate.

High school movies are important for both adults and current high school students. For adults, they transport them back in time. For high school students, it allows them to see that their own problems, as difficult as they might be at that moment, aren’t the end of the world.

There are a lot of options.

Here are some of the movies Marc Pfister, a WHS film teacher, picks. On second reference, Pfister suggests the 2010 comedy/romance “Easy A,” where a girl spreads a rumor about herself to see how people react. Then there’s the 1985 classic “The Breakfast Club,” which showcases five kids from different cliques in detention trying to figure themselves out.

A more recent 2016 suggestion was “The Edge of Seventeen,” which shows how a teenager deals with a social crisis and gives a look at the many different relationships throughout high school.


Our WHS film teacher, Siobhan DeGray also recommends “The Edge of Seventeen,” stating it’s a very good, kind of recent film that applies to high schoolers today and in the past. DeGray said that one of the reasons she loves the movie so much is because adults watching know that it’s not the end of the world. She feels like to kids, when something happens in their social world, they really feel like life is over, and this movie very beautifully demonstrates that that is not the case.


High school is full of crazy days that you think are the worst in your life, but Pfister brings up a very good point: “When you’re a teenager you don’t see how things are going to change, obviously, right? None of us know the future. But what typically changes universally, it happens to everybody… you grow up and get older and you then realize things about when you were a teenager that you thought were really important, that really aren’t”.


These movies show all of that. They show the high school experience, and that’s why they are so important to see. Most high school experiences are universal, and “they help us start conversations about things that perhaps we’re not really sure how we would start on our own… I think that’s a really great superpower that art has,” DeGray says.


In the end, watch the movies. They will bring laughter and maybe tears, but overall, these movies will show truths teens probably won’t find on their own.

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