23 of the Greatest College Movies of All Time
Reading Time: 9 minutesConsider this your syllabus for College Movies 101.
It’s an emotional time of year. Many young adults are headed off to college for the first time, eliciting the mix of tremendous excitement and apprehension that comes with crossing any of life’s major thresholds. Some parents are despondent at the thought of seeing their kids off, while just as many can’t wait to get their homes and lives to themselves for a bit. And then there’s the pressure of knowing that, for many of us, college bills will become a nearly lifelong albatross.)
It’s a lot, and over the decades, the movies have tackled the college years in a lot of different ways. Animal House is an iconic example of the form, and an uncountable number of films since have tried to recreate its drunken, anything-goes frat house vibe, creating a skewed view of what college life is like and what a college movie can be.
Of course, that’s hardly the only valid mode for movies about collegiate life. There are plenty of comedies, sure, but also genuinely moving dramas and thoughtful explorations of the more intellectual side of higher education. These are some of the best and most beloved college movies ever made.
College looms large over American Graffiti, even if we never quite get there. During their last days of summer vacation, Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve (Ron Howard) are living it up (in a small-town kinda way) before heading East to college. That transition away from home and childhood is at the movie’s heart, and also in the film’s DNA: not only is it a reflection of a (just barely) bygone time, it’s also the last time George Lucas would direct anything other than a Star Wars movie, which itself represented an irrevocable shift in the movie industry.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Harold Lloyd’s struggles on entering college are far too real, even nearly a century later. He knows he’s kind of a dork, but also recognizes the opportunity to remake himself as a college freshman far from home. He’s picked up some ticks from his favorite movie star—including doing a weird little dance when he meets new people—and gives himself the nickname ‘Speedy.’ He’s convinced that it’s all working out fine, when actually he’s the butt of everyone’s jokes. He tires out for the football team, but winds up getting a job as the tackling dummy. Fortunately, he gets some good advice from the young woman he’s got a mutual crush on: just be yourself.
Where to stream: HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, YouTube
There’s absolutely nothing nerdy about Rodney Dangerfield’s Thornton Melon: from a family of poor Italian immigrants and a single tailor shop he’s built a corporate empire. His family life, though…is not so hot. He’s recently divorced, and his college-aged son is having a rough time of things. As this is an ’80s comedy, there’s only one thing for Thornton to do: go back to school in order to help out his son and convince him not to drop out. He buys himself a spot in the freshman class, only to immediately challenge the academic staff with his school-of-hard-knocks practical wisdom and willingness to pay for other people to complete all his assignments. It’s mostly just a vehicle for Dangerfield to goof around, but there’s solid comedy in the idea of a sixty-something going back to school not as part of some inspiration narrative, but simply to party, Animal House-style.
Where to stream: HBO Max
Speaking of Animal House: we couldn’t go too far without mentioning the 1978 John Landis classic that convinced many a parent that sending their kids to college was just throwing money down the drain. In 1962 (the same year as American Graffiti, and tapping into a the same sense of pre-assassination innocence), a couple of nerdy freshman make a run at joining a more prestigious fraternity at Faber college, only to find themselves stuck with Delta Tau Chi, an assortment of slobs with dismal academic records, led by John Belushi’s Bluto Blutarsky. They’re also at war with just about everyone: the fancy frat next door, the ROTC cadets, and authoritarian Dean Wormer (John Vernon). There’s not much of a message here, nor much socially redeeming value, but that’s rather the point.
Where to stream: Peacock, Fubo
There are plenty of college movies about the fun and freedom of college life. Whiplash is not one of them. Miles Teller plays Andrew Neiman, an ambitious and talented jazz musician in his first year at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory in New York City. He’s come to the school with big dreams, and quickly gets noticed by the conductor of the conservatory’s studio band, Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons, who won an Oscar for the role). Fletcher is obsessive and cruel, which only feeds Neiman’s overwhelming desire to succeed. Other movies deal with the consequences of not taking college seriously enough; Whiplash offers quite the opposite lesson.
Where to stream: HBO Max, The Roku Channel
The through line here, following DJ (Columbus Short), raised in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood before getting the opportunity to attend an HBCU near Atlanta, is engaging, if fairly by-the-numbers. It’s also largely beside the point: we’re here for the dance battles between competing fraternities and, in that, this film is well worth the watch.
Where to stream: Starz
Very loosely based on a true story, Pitch Perfect sees freshman Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick) joining up with a slightly rag-tag all-female a cappella group at Barden University. Like other college movies dealing with rival sports teams or, in this case, singing groups, it’s fairly formulaic, but a ton of fun, providing breakout roles for some of its actors, particularly Rebel Wilson. It was a huge hit, inspiring two sequels and a forthcoming Peacock TV series.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Marlon Brando’s last great performance is an enormously entertaining call-back to his most memorable role, that of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Here, he’s Carmine Sabatini, mobster and proprietor of the Gourmet Club, a pop-up event that hosts wealthy patrons who pay for the privilege of dining on endangered species. Matthew Broderick’s Clark Kellogg doesn’t have much money for his NYU education, but he does have an in with Sabatini, one that at first sees him running small errands, before finding himself drawn deeper into the organization’s operations. It’s all in good fun, and, honestly, running errands for a mafioso is probably far from the worst thing I’d have done for college money.
Where to stream: HBO Max
Spike Lee’s early (semi-)musical comedy is often overshadowed by Do the Right Thing, released only a year later, but it’s a classic in its own right. Based on Lee’s own years as a student at Morehouse in the 1970s, School Daze stars Laurence Fishburne as Dap Dunlap, a socially conscious student at an unnamed HBCU. There, the students come to blows (literally) over political issues like Apartheid divestment, as well as closer-to-home concerns like colorism and hair politics. The film’s exhortation to Black students to ‘please, wake up,’ has devolved into a form of mockery, but only in the hands of assholes. In the movie? It’s bracing.
Where to stream: Hulu, Tubi
Before we knew for certain that social media would be our doom, Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher teamed up to tell the origin story of Facebook and its creator, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). Like all of our greatest societal innovations, The Facebook was born from noble motives: dumped by his girlfriend,19-year-old Harvard student Zuckerberg decides to build a social network with which people will be able to tell women how ugly they are. From such worthy seeds are technological revolutions born.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Directed by and starring Denzel Washington, this genuinely engaging drama brings inspirational-sports-movie tropes to the more unlikely theme of college debate societies. This is the true story of the 1930s debate team at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, an historically Black college. Washington is the team’s coach, with a mission to see his talented students compete on the same level as members of all-white teams in the segregated south—adding their first female member (June Smollett) for good measure. The team achieved the impossible, but not without running a gamut of overt and violent racism along the way, and the movie tells the tale.
Where to stream: The Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto, Plex, Freevee
The late, great John Singleton explores modern segregation and xenophobia from the perspective of several incoming freshmen at the fictional Columbus University. Just a few years out of USC himself, the writer/director creates a messy, engaging portrait of a college campus torn by internal divisions, with self-identified groups and cliques either avoiding each other entirely or entering into violent conflict. It’s Singleton’s messiest film, full of ideas and characters who meander without ever coalescing—all of which makes it a pretty solid portrayal of the atmosphere of college life.
Where to stream: The Roku Channel
The movie that made household names of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (and won them a shared Original Screenplay Oscar), Good Will Hunting is the story of a gifted Damon’s gifted Southie, the Will Hunting of the title, a mathematics genius working as a janitor at MIT. He solves an equation left on a blackboard overnight, bringing himself to the attention of one of the school’s math professors. In trouble with the law, the professor arranges to keep Will out of jail if he studies math and meets for therapy sessions with a psychotherapist played by Robin Williams. The plot trajectory is largely predictable, but the screenplay, direction, and performances all allow the largely believable characters to live and breathe.
Where to stream: Digital rental
One of the great romances of modern cinema covers a longer span of time than four years in the lives of leads Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps, but their college sports careers form the movie’s spine. When the two lifelong friends and athletes attend USC together, it marks both the beginning of their romantic relationship after a long period of friendship, and sends them toward the eventual breakdown of their romantic prospects as their mutual need to focus on their separate futures pulls them apart.
Where to stream: Netflix, HBO Max
Surfer and aspiring artist Zach (Trevor Wright) has every intention of going to art school (California Institute of the Arts, specifically), but money and family complications keep getting in the way. His father’s disabled, and his irresponsible sister had left her 5-year-old largely in Zach’s care. His best friend’s older brother, Shaun (Brad Rowe) comes to town, and the two begin a relationship that gives Zach the stability and confidence he needs to pursue his dreams…it’s just that heading off to art school could well mean the end of their relationship. Growing up isn’t just about what you gain, but what you might have to give up.
Where to stream: Here TV
A spiritual sequel to the director’s Dazed and Confused, and based on his own experiences, Richard Linklater’s 2016 comedy follows a crew of basketball players attending college in Texas in the 1980s. Blake Jenner is the newcomer to the movie’s school and team, dealing with the responsibilities and freedoms of independence among a mixed group of newbies and upperclassmen. Like Dazed and Confused, it’s a sweetly meandering comedy that deals in character more than plot.
Where to stream: Netflix, HBO Max
Stoner pals Method Man and Redman get some help from their dead friend after smoking his ashes, acing their college entrance exams and winding up at Harvard. There’s not much more to the movie than that, and their unique method of getting into college is going to be hard to replicate, but it’s an amiable stoner comedy with enough solid jokes to make it worth the runtime.
Where to stream: Digital rental
This 2009 comedy-drama (itself based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel Five Point Someone) introduces a pair of brainy college students, Raju and Farnan, starting out at a prestigious Engineering school in Delhi and under tremendous pressure from their parents and the Indian education system to succeed. They quickly make friends with Rancho, a laid-back student for whom everything comes easy. In some aspects, it’s a comedy about college life, but in others, it’s a both a parody and an indictment of an educational system that puts students into buckets and demands success at all costs.
Where to stream: Netflix
Tessa Thompson heads the cast in this sharp and funny satire that inspired the Netflix series of the same name. Samantha White, a Black student at a fictitious, predominantly white Ivy League college, hosts a deliberately provocative campus radio show that frequently challenges and critiques the school’s white students. She runs up against fellow Black students more concerned with respectability than confrontation, with the movie ultimately raising interesting questions about identity and intersectionality.
Where to stream: Epix
I, too, have a natural facility for scaring children, but I never got the chance to attend MU like Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman). It’s not quite top-tier Pixar, but it puts a charming and clever spin on college-movie tropes as the two Scarers learn to work together throughout their college years.
Where to stream: Disney+
A high-concept horror comedy that works way better than it has any right to, director Christopher Landon’s film sees snobby, popular sorority girl Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) waking up in the room of a friendly nerd after a night partying to start a day that ends in her murder. And then waking up and doing it all over again, and again. She’s doomed to keep reliving the same deadly day over and over until she can solver her own murder—and maybe work on herself a bit in the process. Which is what college is all about, yeah?
Where to stream: Digital rental
The kick-off to a popular series of gay sex comedies, Eating Out introduces Tiffani von der Sloot (Rebekah Kochan) and her friends and rivals at the University of Arizona. The plot is a convoluted, Three’s Company-esque series of mix-ups involving gay guys pretending to be straight and straight guys pretending to be gay, but it’s got exactly the right amount of dorky charm and nudity that this kind of movie needs to succeed. It’s fun.
Where to stream: Tubi, Kanopy
A comedy-drama set in the high-stakes world of college marching bands, Drumline is an undeniable classic, if the plot is a little familiar and borrows beats from other college sports/music competition movies. Nick Cannon is Devon, drummer recruited to an Atlanta HBCU, and a young man with more talent than people skills. His cocky attitude and refusal to work with his teammates eventually puts him on the road to losing everything, and forces him to realize that his skills might not be enough. Any movie that can make band competitions this thrilling is fine by me.
Where to stream: Digital rental