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80
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Film Threat Brad Laidman
This could have been an unmitigated disaster, but Hughes' way with the material ensured it a special place in the heart of just about everyone who happened to be in high school while Ronald Reagan was President.
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78
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Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Before lapsing into the land of the insipid,... John Hughes actually made a few movies that shined some light on the trials of modern adolescence. The Breakfast Club is one of them.
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75
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Entertainment Weekly Ty Burr
From the neon-sign opening titles to the derivative angst of the dialogue, it's a touchstone of '80s pop culture, and a schizophrenic one, too.
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75
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ReelViews James Berardinelli
Eminently watchable and consistently entertaining...It has a candor that is unexpected and refreshing in a sea of too-often generic teen-themed films.
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75
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The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jay Scott
For all its contrivance, it's lively and amusing and occasionally disconcerting in its reproduction of what life was like in the mid-to-late teens.
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70
|
Washington Post
Their conversations give The Breakfast Club its snap, crackle and pop. And this is that rare movie that could benefit from another half hour of talking time. [15 Feb 1985]
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70
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Chicago Reader
Comes to the comforting conclusion that they're just as alienated, idealistic, and vulnerable as the baby boomers of the 1960s.
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60
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The New York Times Elvis Mitchell
The five young stars would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter-group candor towardS which The Breakfast Club forces them. Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone.
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60
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TV Guide
Hughes, though he gives the material a sense of fun and achieves several moments of genuine warmth, too often resorts to obvious cliches, stereotypes, and easy answers, and throws in the near-obligatory rock video as well.
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40
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The New Yorker Pauline Kael
But all that this encounter-session movie actually does is strip a group of high-school kids down to their most banal longings to be accepted and liked. Its real emblem is that dreary, retro ribbon. [8 Apr 1985, p.123]
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