It was a movie ahead of its time: critics gave Ferris Bueller’s Day Off lukewarm reviews when it came out ion 1986: Gene Siskel, for instance, gave it only two stars, saying that “it’s a movie that doesn’t know what it wanted to be.”
Of course that was both wrong, and the entire point. Who knows who we want to be when we’re 17? (Except maybe Charlie Sheen, who owned his scene with Jennifer Grey at the police station). Ferris Bueller’s Day Off deftly captured the angst and the seeming immortality of the last days of high school, all the while giving us the greatest parade scene in the history of cinema.