Sixteen Candles

Its Middle American cast of plastic females and self-regarding males look and behave like delegates to a Republican convention. The slight plot is strung out on a series of gross jokes.

Watch with compassion.

There's also a darkly handsome high school heartbreak kid (Michael Schoeffling), a merciful brisk pace, some quick humor (visual and verbal), and a solid music track.

As the girl, Molly Ringwald is natural and appealing, but she's lost in a world of blunt, vicious caricatures.

Sly humour and an appreciative ear for the demotic improv of teenage chat completes an attractive package.

A sweet and funny movie about two of the worst things that can happen to a girl on her sixteenth birthday.

Sixteen Candles is a genuinely funny film with plenty of throwaway gags that betray Hughes' Lampoon origins.

At times it's laugh-out-loud funny, highlighting the awkwardness of adolescence through alternations of clumsiness, low self-esteem, and misadventures of maturation.

Meandering and kind of dull and doesn't quite manage to be as sweet as its romantic final scene.

To try to explain Sixteen Candles as a person who was there for it in first run today is to helplessly shrug and say, 'I don't know, man, it was a different time.'