The History Boys (R, 2006)

Much as Hector (Richard Griffiths) enjoys his work, which he sees as opening young minds to new ideas, the affable teacher at Cutler's Grammar School in Sheffield, England, feels frustrated. A not-so-closeted gay man, he admires his young male students in ways he's not supposed to. His students appreciate his entertainments, as well as his appreciation of them. In exchange, over the years they've learned to take turns allowing him to touch their "thighs" during rides home on his motorbike. The boys' grades are good enough that they might get into Oxford and Cambridge, so the headmaster (Clive Merrison) brings in an additional teacher to give them "polish and edge." The much younger, Cambridge-educated Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) teaches by a different method. Where Hector wants the boys to feel invested in what they learn, Irwin suggests that they take adversarial positions just to look smart, whether they believe them or not.

Set in 1983, THE HISTORY BOYS has a certain stagey feel: Characters speak in perfectly overlapping dialogue and clever quips. For the most part, the boys are a collection of token types: rowdy playboy Dakin (Dominic Cooper), gay and sensitive Posner (Samuel Barnett), black Crowther (Samuel Anderson), Muslim Akhtar (Sacha Dhawan), white jock Rudge (Russell Tovey), wisecracking Lockwood (Andrew Knott), overweight Timms (James Coden). While each offers an occasional pithy observation to sum up a moment (the most memorable being Rudge's remark that history is "just one f--king thing after another"), as a group, they seem like the result of a one-from-every-food-group casting call.

Surveying the proceedings from the position designated "outside" by virtue of her gender, history teacher Dorothy Lintott (the excellent Frances de la Tour, who, like Griffiths, has also been seen in the Harry Potter movies) lays out the film's simultaneous awareness and exploitation of its own limits. "Imagine how depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude," she declares. "History is not such a frolic for women as it is for men. ... History is women following behind, with a bucket."