The History Boys

Since there will always be an England, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly, there will always be movies about British dons whose influence on the boys under their tutelage "is colored by wittily expressed memories of the old goat's foolish (rather than harmful) homosexual hanky-panky." Nicholas Hytner uses almost the same cast that appeared in his London and New York stage productions to re-create Alan Bennett's tale of eight public-school boys preparing for admittance to Oxford and Cambridge in 1983. Richard Griffiths again plays Hector, the corpulent, charismatic tutor, and the film again affirms the value of learning—oh, and that his habit of fondling his students' genitals is perfectly innocent. Hector is no predator, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times, and his whip-smart students know it. They tolerate his fumbling advances "with good humor as expressions of devotion." Despite the classroom's hothouse atmosphere, said Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, the film is primarily an exploration of the meaning of knowledge. Hector has a rival in Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a teacher newly graduated from Oxford who cynically believes scholarship has only one purpose—to help a person get ahead in life. As these "impossibly erudite" students take sides in the debate, the film ultimately becomes "a paean to the possibilities of education, or a eulogy."

Rating: R

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