It's true that they usually aren't considered respectable by well-paid critics. They tend to be formulaic, retrograde and prescriptive, made by people who haven't been in high school for a long time for relatively little money. Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions is all of this and less.
Unsupervised kids go bad.
In Cruel Intentions , the villains are rich, but the film avoids even the most obvious class analysis. The art of high school movies depends on a certain respect for their viewers. Cruel Intentions misses this point. Cecile is a lovely, tension-relieving creature, but Blair's expert comedy seems to obscure other, more disturbing aspects of the film. The problem is that Cruel Intentions imagines that its gestures toward inclusiveness are enough.