Richard Corliss: “Hughes generated successful movie-comedy franchises as fast as other people wrote postcards. First the National Lampoon Vacation films … Then the teen movies” – Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – “not strictly a series but with more or less the same rep company of kids. And then the blockbuster Home Alone” and its sequels. (Not to mention the movies about Beethoven the enormous dog, written under a pseudonym.)