The 1985 poster for The Breakfast Club and the initial poster designed for American Teen (Paramount Vantage)

The new documentary American Teen (opening August 8 at select theaters) is something of a real life Breakfast Club (you remember that John Hughes film about "a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse..."). American Teen focuses on five teens representing such school cliques as jocks, geeks, and the popular set. I spoke with director Nanette Burstein about capturing contemporary teen life for her film. You can listen to my radio feature or read the extended interview.

We all remember that iconic and epic film The Breakfast Club. Either you were born watching it or your parents got you into it or even the latest fad of being retro required you to have a large knowledge of whether you were a princess, a brain, a criminal, etc. So when you walked down the theatre aisle and saw this new movie poster for the latest documentary directed by Nanette Burstein, American Teen, you probably had to take a second look, to make sure that it isn't a remake. This documentary has been compared to the most famous 80s movie, but this film is most definitely not a remake. This movie, being a documentary, takes a world that has been displayed in fiction, and in over-dramatic television "reality" shows, and it offers a more in depth and sincere look at the lives of the modern high school teen. The film includes the cliques, struggling to graduate, and teen heartbreak. Overall this film is a great model of what preteens have to look forward to, what teenagers have to live through, and what adults have successfully survived. After I had seen this film I had the great opportunity of meeting and interviewing the director, Nanette Burstein. In the way she spoke of her subjects, I saw the love she had for them and it assured me that this director only had the truest intentions in what that life is like, and I was grateful that this woman chose to deliver this message.

-- Candace Kavanagh just graduated from Mount Miguel High School. She spends her life absorbing celluloid images. She loves every type of film from so-called "chick flicks" such as My Fair Lady and Legally Blonde, to mind bending thrillers like Mulholland Drive and Hard Candy -- with every zombie movie, action flick, musical, and comedy in between.

Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode star in a new adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (Miramax)

We get a break from superheroes this week as a new adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited comes to the big screen. PBS adapted Brideshead Revisited back in 1981. The very popular mini-series concerned class and religion in pre-war England, and it launched Jeremy Irons' career. But a mini-series has the luxury of time that a single feature film does not. So that's the challenge facing Julian Jarrold as he revisits Brideshead Revisited (opened August 1 at Landmark's Hillcrest and La Jolla Village Theaters) and must decide what to cut and what to hold onto from Waugh's novel. So while the PBS series got to cover more of the actual text, this new film offers a truncated but more narrowly focused version of the book.

Drugs for therapy... The Wackness (Sony Pictures Classics)

It's 1994, and Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is spending his summer before college listening to hip-hop and selling drugs from an ice cream cart in New York City. His shrink, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), lets him trade dope for therapy, but Luke's more interested in the doc's sexy step-daughter than any psychobabble. Writer-director Jonathan Levine serves up a funny, sharp, and ultimately compassionate coming of age tale with his sophomore feature The Wackness (opening July 11 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas). Liste to the KPBS Film Club of the Air Discussion of The Wackness.

Julianne Moore delivers a knockout performance in Savage Grace (IFC Films)

Filmmaker Tom Kalin burst on the indie scene in 1992 with a black and white take on the Loeb-Leopold murder case, Swoon. But he's been relatively silent since then, hovering under the radar making shorts and penning a script for photographer Cindy Sherman's Office Killer. But Kalin returns to art house feature films with an adaptation of Natalie Robins' book Savage Grace (opening July 4 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas). Harkening back to the kind of uncomfortable mother-son relationship of Bertolucci's Luna, Savage Grace offers us Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne as a perversely interdependent mother and son. The film boasts another sensational performance by Moore and a welcome return to feature directing by Kalin. Listen to our KPBS Film Club discussion of the film.

Encounters at the End of the World or Herzog Goes to the South Pole (Discovery Films)

German filmmaker Werner Herzog is becoming known for more than just his art house films. The man who directed such stellar works as Aguirre, Wrath of God and the recent Rescue Dawn is also starting to get recognized for his appearances in documentaries about him. Burden of Dreams chronicled his obsession to make Fitzcarraldo in the jungle, and in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe the director makes good on a bet and does precisely what the title says. In those documentaries, Herzog displays a dour, anal-retentive, and thoroughly obsessive persona that would be mocked in the faux documentaries Incident at Loch Ness and The Grand. What makes Herzog so entertaining is that he's so serious and he seems completely unaware of how funny that is. In both Loch Ness and The Grand, he acts as if he doesn't realize it's all a joke. In his documentaries, Herzog becomes as much of a character as the people he films. Although he doesn't generally appear on camera in his documentaries, he contributes voiceover narration and asks questions off screen as he pursues people who are as obsessive as he is. Little Dieter Needs to Fly gave us a man obsessed with becoming a pilot and Grizzly Man focused on a man whose passion for bears eventually led to his death. Now Herzog heads down to the South Pole for Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about the odd collection of folks at the bottom of the world.

Father and daughter reunion as Asia Argento stars in her father's Mother of Tears (Myriad Pictures)

I fell in love with Dario Argento when I was17 I saw Suspiria. It scared the crap out of me and sent my friend running for the exit. None of his films since then have been able to duplicate the impressive jolt - like riding a rollercoaster and feeling like the tracks have suddenly disappeared and you're free falling - of seeing Suspiria for the first time. But I have found something to enjoy in each of his films. Now using the word "enjoy" to describe a Dario Argento "spaghetti horror" film is likely to offend some people who find his films excessively gory and sadistic. But Argento is a horror master who's made an art out of terrifying audiences. Suspiria, made in 1977, was the first of what would turn out to be a long gestating supernatural trilogy he called the Three Mothers. The second film was Inferno (1980), set in New York, and this year he delivers the finale, Mother of Tears (opening June 27 at Landmark's Ken Cinema), set in Rome. (You can listen to the KPBS Film Club for our discussion of the film.)

The new documentary Up the Yangtze considers China's Three Gorges Dam project. (Zeitgeist)

The new documentary Up the Yangtze (opening June 20 at Landmark's Ken Cinema) begins with a few words from Confucius about the three ways one can learn wisdom. The first way is by reflection, which is richest; the second is by imitation, which is easiest; and the third is by experience, which is bitterest. The wisdom of China's decision to go ahead with its Three Gorges Dam - the biggest hydroelectric dam in history and some say a project headed for eco-disaster -- is at the heart of Up the Yangtze. But Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang doesn't come at his subject from the obvious angle of environmental lecturing. Instead, he serves up a personal narrative that focuses on the very human cost of building the dam and flooding the equivalent of the Grand Canyon. (You can also listen to the KPBS Film discussion of teh film.)

Tadanobu Asano stars as Genghis Khan in the new film Mongol (Picturehouse)

Genghis Khan is probably best remembered as a bloody conqueror. But to Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov the Mongol ruler was much more than that. Bodrov attempts to correct some misconceptions about the 13th century leader with his Oscar nominated film Mongol (opening June 20 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas. (You can listen to our KPBS Film Club discussion of the film and to my interview with the director for The World.)

Genghis Khan is a well-known name in Russia, though the Mongol conqueror is not remembered fondly there, says director Sergei Bodrov.

SERGEI BODROV: "He was described as the cruelest person in the world but he was so bad in all my school books that when I was growing up that I started to be suspicious. His history was written by his enemies. And you have to question this."

And that's what Bodrov's new film Mongol does. It questions how history has depicted Genghis Khan. The film focuses on the Mongol ruler's youth, when he was known simply as Temudgin (played by an impressive Odnyam Odsuren as a boy, and with quiet confidence by Japan's Tadanobu Asano as an adult).

Filmmaker Chris Bell explores steroid use in America in Bigger Stronger Faster* (HD Net)

That asterisk is actually part of the title of the new documentary Bigger Stronger Faster* (opening June 13 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas) and it references the film's subtitle - The Side Effects of Being American. Chris Bell makes his documentary feature debut with Bigger Stronger Faster* and he uses his own family as a starting point to explore the issue of steroids in America. He opens the film by explaining that he wanted to be ripped like Hulk Hogan or Sly Stallone or the Terminator but in reality he "was a fat pale kid from Poughkeepsie."