Every generation has is defining cultural artifacts: music and movies, characters and catchphrases, fads and fashions that set them apart from the generation that came before them. And though we are probably more alike than we are different, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z aren’t the same, and our favorite movies about growing up reflect that.

Yesterday we listed the best of the 1960s through the 1990s, so today we look at the 2000s through today. Here are the five of the best movies about growing up, per decade.

The 2000s – Bring It On

1. Mean Girls – Like Heathers before it, Mean Girls focuses on a toxic group of popular girls that make life hell for everyone else at North Shore High School. Unlike Heathers, there’s more emotional violence than physical in this 2004 comedy, but the consequences are nearly as dire. Lindsay Lohan is Cady, who like Veronica, tries to stand up to the all-powerful clique leader, Regina George (Rachel McAdams) only to find herself becoming something even worse – a traitor. Tina Fey wrote the whip-smart script and stars, along with Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried and Lizzy Caplan.
2. Superbad – This one’s for the fellas. Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, this film is about a fictional (maybe) Seth and Evan, played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, who spend one crazy night trying to get drunk and maybe get laid. Not much has changed since the American Grafitti days, although the fun is a lot more raunchy in 2007 than it was in 1973. Seth and Evan need fake IDs, and turn to their friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to help them out, and they end up with the most unconvincing fake IDs in hisotry. The night only gets wackier as the three get into one wacky situation after another.
3. Bring it On – This 2000 movie both celebrated and lampooned the all-American institution of cheerleading. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku and Gabrielle Union, the story of competing high school cheerleading squads became both a box office success and a cult classic. When Torrance Shipman (Dunst) becomes captain of the Rancho Carne Toros cheerleading squad, she is embarassed to discover that all the cheer routines that have propelled the squad to wins at regionals were plagiarized from the East Compton Clovers, a Black squad led by Isis (Union.) Torrance and her new BFF Missy (Dushku) must get creative to design their own routine or risk losing the National title. It’s silly stuff, but the script is sly enough to poke fun at the characters while also making them impossible to root against.
4. Love Don’t Cost a Thing – Before Nick Cannon fathered dozens of children, he was uber-nerd Alvin in this 2003 comedy about going from zero to hero. Alvin is a pool boy who wants to date the most popular girl in school, Paris (Christina Milian), who is so gorgeous she’s dating an NBA star. He gives up his scholarship money to help Paris, who pays him back with a makeover and by pretending to be his girlfriend for a little while. Alvin becomes popular for real, which means of course that he acts like a horse’s ass to all his real friends, and to Paris, who has started to actually fall for him. Though this movie is a remake of a 1987 Patrick Dempsey film called Can’t Buy Me Love, it’s worth noting that Roger Ebert liked this version better.
5. Almost Famous – William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is the only actual teen in this 2000 movie, but he does a lot of growing up in this tale of a wannabe rock journalist who gets an unlikely assignment: travel with an up and coming rock band to chronicle their story for Rolling Stone magazine. Cameron Crowe wrote and directed the story, which is a slightly fictionalized telling of his own life story. William is only 15 when he abandons school to follow the band Stillwater, led by the enigmatic Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup.) He gets adopted by one of the band’s groupies, Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), who makes it her mission to educate William about life on the road. This movie has landed on many critics’ lists of the best movies ever made, which is not something that can be said for most movies listed in these articles.

Runners-Up: Love and Basketball, She’s All That, High School Musical, Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Legally Blonde, 500 Days of Summer, the Twilight series, the Harry Potter series, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Save the Last Dance, The Princess Diaries, Friday Night Lights, and Juno.

The 2010s – Book Smart

1. Book Smart – Girls just wanna have fun too, as this 2019 comedy directed by Olivia Wilde proves. Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) figure out that they wasted their entire high school career by devoting all their time to getting good grades, so they decide to party hearty for the first – and possibly last – time before going to college. Amy is secretly crushing on another girl, and Molly is also hoping to get together with Nick, the boy whose party they are trying (and failing) to find. Hearts get broken, friendships get tested, and someone goes to jail in this madcap romp with heart.
2. The Hate U Give – This critically-acclaimed 2018 film was very much of the moment, depicting the under-addressed problem of police violence against young black men, something that had been going on for way too long, but which had only recently begun to be captured on cell phone cameras. This movie follows Starr (Amandla Stenberg), a young Black girl who attends a majority-white private school. While out with her best friend Khalil (Algee Smith), the two are stopped by the police, who subsequently shoot and kill the unarmed Khalil. Starr, though shattered by the murder, agrees to not only testify in court about the shooting, but goes on to become an activist, even though it puts her life and future in jeopardy.
3. Lady Bird – Saoirse Ronan stars as the title character in director Greta Gerwig’s 2017 directorial debut. Ronan is Christine, a headstrong young woman who wants more out of life than her uptight mother Marion (Laurie Metcalfe) thinks Christine should ask for. Christine, who has dubbed herself ‘Lady Bird’, wants to go to college in “a city with culture,” something her mom says they can’t afford. Lady Bird hits all the teen movie tropes – parties, losing her virginity, going off to college – but this movie is really about the mother-daughter relationship, and how very fragile it can be when girls must grow up and establish their own identities. The film also stars Beanie Feldstein as her best friend, Julie, and Timothée Chalamet as Christine’s love interest, Kyle.
4. Happy Death Day 2U – This sequel to the horror film Happy Death Day subverted the genre of its predecessor, which was a clever Groundhog Day-style slasher pic, by giving the story a science fiction twist that also dealt with the difficulty of processing grief. In the movie, Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) who got out of her time loop at the end of the first movie, finds out what was causing the temporal anomaly – only to get sucked right back into it. This time, though, she is faced with a chance to spend time with her late mother – perhaps permanently. Will she choose to alter reality and avoid her mom’s tragic death?
5. Love, Simon – This 2018 movie, starring Nick Robinson and directed by Greg Berlanti, follows a closeted gay teenager as he explores his crush on an anonymous pen pal, who like him, has yet to come out. An adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s young adult novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the film received critical acclaim for its modern take on the teen rom-com genre. The movie starred Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Garner as Simon’s parents.

Runners-Up include The Edge of Seventeen, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Easy A, Eighth Grade, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Fallout, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Dope, Teen Spirit, Kick-Ass, and American Honey.

What movies from the 2020s will make this list at the end of the decade? It’s hard to say now, but look for titles like Unpregnant, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Charm City Kings, Enola Holmes, All Together Now and The Half of It.