This list was originally published on May 29, 2019. It has been updated to include additional movies for graduation season. High school is a nearly universal American experience, and so, then, is the end of high school.
Regardless of whether it culminates in graduation or not, the conclusion of those four years happens right around one’s 18th birthday, thus providing young people with a one-two sucker punch of impending adulthood, and the whole world telling them that they don’t have to go home but they can’t stay here — school that is. Finishing compulsory education and figuring out what to do next is so fraught with a mixture of tension, anxiety, optimism, and possibility that this particular time in life has and will continue to provide excellent fodder for movies. There are lots of movies about the end of school, and how scary and exciting it is to be forced to grow up and leave behind the life and people and hometown that provided a bubble of comfort for so long.
These are the best movies about those things. It’s the rare high-school senior who actually looks forward to the end of high school, in the sense that they’re ready to take on the real world, and feel mature and prepared enough to do so. Most go kicking and screaming, ripped from the comfortable womb of pre-college and home life to instead flail about in their young adulthood.
Every high-school kid also thinks every other high-school kid besides them have it figured it out (they don’t) and this mov.