As AI slop takes over our screens, what better antidote for enquiring minds than a magical film? We ask directors, producers and critics to pick one must-see movie for each year from infancy to early adulthood

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Screentime has a bad rep these days: it’s allegedly at the root of everything from the collapse of media literacy to the rise of the far right. For parents, and indeed anyone who cares about the future of the planet, the relationship children have to their screens is a particular hot potato.

‘Alan and I have neat hair because we’d both just been in a military play. If we’d had crazy 1980s mullets, it wouldn’t have become a timeless classic’

I’d done WarGames and Ladyhawke and was getting sent a lot of “young guy” parts. I was a little concerned at first because Ferris talks to the audience – I’d done that in two plays and didn’t want to it to seem like that’s all I could do. Meanwhile, my agent said: “You’ve been asked to do a John Hughes movie. You’re doing it.” I didn’t know much about John at the time but I kept hearing him being referred to as the “Spielberg of teen films”.

The latest in our series of writers celebrating their favourite comfort watches is an ode to John Hughes’s 1980s classic

It’s hard to ignore a film’s message when the main character is addressing you directly down the barrel of the camera. Granted, the first time I watched the 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I was the impressionable age of 11 and “Look people in the eyes when they’re talking to you” was on constant rotation in my household. So my green eyes met Ferris’s brown ones and I took it all in.

Centred around Matthew Broderick’s playful turn as Ferris Bueller, a high school senior faking illness to skip school, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is certainly a celebration of the carefree, though the story is by no means languid. Made frantic by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do with the aid of a red Ferrari, the day speeds by in comparison to the fictional days of other American teen films, such as American Graffiti and Dazed & Confused – which, to be fair, features a decent amount of marijuana.