Review

Culture

Education

7 September 2023

6 min read

Back to school on the big screen

It’s back to school for many. Yaroslav Walker picks his favourite films capturing the friendship, the drama, and the expectation of school life and beyond.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

School students walk across a playground confidently talking and laughing with us

The History Boys.

BBC Films.

The summer is coming to an end, the last BBQ embers are sputtering to sleep, the weather…appears not to have been told, at least in London! Sweltering! Most importantly of all, our children are back to school, nursery or college. In light of this momentous time of year here are my top five back to school film choices, one each for the last five decades, and some honourable mentions.

1970s - American Grafitti

A teenage couple dressed in 1950s clothes sit on a kerb in deep conversation.

Charles Martin Smith and Candy Clark in American Graffiti

American Graffiti isn’t just a lovely piece of nostalgia now, it was back then. A misty-eyed look back at 60s Americana, this film is packed with slicked-back hair, classic cars, diners with roller-skating waitresses, and the complexities of teenage romance. Four friends meet on the last day of summer to experience the joys of a California evening one last time before two of them jet off to college ‘back East’. Curt is unsure about his future and is even considering staying in his hometown. Steve is hubristically thrilled about the prospect of fleeing his humdrum life and even shedding his loving girlfriend for new conquests. Terry is insecure and simply desperate to prove he is as good as everyone else, and Milner is the older friend who never left town and is a local-legend drag-racer. Over the course of a long night they go their separate ways, have adventures, and finally find some closure to their ongoing anxieties: one finds new confidence, another begins to take risks, another learns to be happy with his lot, and Milner wins a drag race…oh, an learns the genuine happiness that can be found in adult responsibility. It's too long, but it is a lovely atmosphere to meander about in, and is edited superbly so it never really drags. With superb performances and a soundtrack bursting with 50s and 60s hits, this is well worth a watch.

1980s - The Breakfast Club

Five glum students perch on stools in school room.

Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club.

Well what else could it have been!? In many ways the film set the classic pattern of US High School living (which did and sometimes still does inform UK attitudes) and the High School movie. John Hughes didn’t invent these archetypes and wasn’t the first to put them on celluloid, but he was the master of crystallising them. The Breakfast Club presents an all-day detention that just so happens to have a representative from every social caste of the High School system: Andrew the jock (Emelio Esteves), Brian the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), Allison the weirdo (Ally Sheedy), Claire the popular girl (Molly Ringwald), and Bender the burnout (Judd Nelson). These five kids have nothing in common but their dislike of the domineering Vice-Principal (Paul Gleason was born for this role!)…OR DO THEY!? Whereas American Graffiti explored the process of maturing into adulthood and the taking charge of one’s sense of self (with a background hum of Vietnam paranoia and the end of golden Americana days), The Breakfast Club is much more forthright in demonstrating just how difficult being a teenager is. These kids don’t need help ‘growing up’, if anything they need to be allowed to be kids. Over the course of the day their defences break down and they learn that each of them has expectations and pressures that seem overwhelming, and grown to have genuine respect and compassion for each other. A script that is sometimes on-the-nose and prone to soliloquy is saved by the sheer bravura of the performances. A go to comfort film, that will always be iconic. Any film which ends with Simple Minds is a 5 star affair for me.

1990s - The Faculty

Two students walk down a school corridor, one looking away.

Elijah Wood and Jordana Brewster in The Faculty.

We move to slightly scarier fare with the 90s. The Faculty asks the question you were all asking…what if Invasion of the Bodysnatchers took place in an American high school? The answer is subtext; a lot of subtext and allegory. You know, when you’re a teenager, everything can seem quite tough. The world can seem like it's against you. It can seem like everyone you know has changed overnight and you’re lost in a sea of hostile faces. It can seem like a parasitic alien is using your school as a beachhead for a planetary takeover. The Faculty is cinematic junk-food and unapologetically so. It is camp and silly and fun. It takes those Hughesian archetypes, puts them on steroids, and then throws them into a plot joyfully riffing on the most classic sci-fi and horror tropes - all held nicely together with a quip-filled Kevin Williamson screenplay. An underrated Robert Rodriguez directorial effort which shows that he can work well across genres, and an excellent opportunity to see early performances from Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jon Stewart, and…wait…is that Usher in that film!?

2000s - The History Boys

Yes, we move to British shores at last. Alan Bennett’s stage-play is brought to beautiful cinematic life by original director Nicholas Hytner, who has an excellent track record of translating Bennett’s work from stage to screen. It’s another flash of nostalgia (which all such films are, as adult writers and directors look back to their own school days and teenage angst and adventure) which transports the viewer to 1980s Sheffield. A group of friends at the local Grammar School have all done very well in their A Levels and are now put to the task of preparing for the Oxford entrance exams. All are lovers of History (well, maybe not Rudge) and have received an enviously eclectic education in the full gamut of culture from the eccentric and long-suffering Hector. Like all the films above, The History Boys explores the challenges of adolescence, but with a specific focus on ‘doing well’ in a particularly British way. Sporting excellence or popularity aren’t the measure of student success - Oxbridge is. The teachers don’t push the young men nearly as much as they do themselves, seeing a place at Oxford as the best form of advancement. The witty and moving script also touches on the issue of infatuation, attraction, sexual fluidity, and chaste reciprocity: Posner’s love for Dakin being encouraged only so far in some sort of mutually agreed stand-off, Dakin’s willingness to sleep with the substitute teacher Irwin, and (of course) Hector’s tradition of giving the boys a ride home on his motorcycle and…appreciating them aesthetically. Not easy subject matter, but written and directed and shot and performed with such sensitivity that you can’t help but fall in love with every character.

2010s - The Inbetweeners Movie

Two students look at each in in incomprehension.

Blake Harrison and Simon Bird in The Inbetweeners.

We end with crudity. Crudity and friendship and a booze-filled week in Crete. Lovers of the TV show (I was one) - which explored the trials and tribulations of four unpopular, unremarkable, and unfortunate teens at a British comprehensive school- were well served by this upgrade. TV comedies, like plays, rarely translate well; The Inbetweeners Movie is an honourable exception. Will, Simon, Jay, and Neil have come to the end of their school days and decide that they need one final hurrah before they go their separate ways. The proceeding 90 minutes is a torrent of drunken antics, foul-mouthed discourse, and crass toilet humour, all threaded together by hapless and fruitless sexual intrigue. 90 mins of that might seem like it would wear thin, but The Inbetweeners Movie is too kind-hearted to go stale (unlike its successor which was a genuinely squalid and unpleasant affair which had me questioning humanity). The four young men are so pathetic in the true sense of the word, that you can’t help but cheer for them. The overall message of friendship as a virtue that transcends the ups-and-downs of life give the salty humour a sweet edge. For a certain generation - mine - this might be the definitive British school movie.

Honourable Mentions

Grease

Sort of like American Graffiti…but better. I’m talking Travolta, I’m talking Newton-John, I’m talking songs that are bullet-proof! Graffiti is on the official list because it speaks to the many cultural and political undercurrents of the time…but Grease is so much more fun. If you can only see one of the two, see Grease!

Gregory’s Girl

Pipped by Breakfast because of the archetypes and Simple Minds, but probably one of the finest British rom-coms ever!

Mean Girls

Obviously. It's so fetch!

Review

Books

Culture

Language

Romance

5 June 2025

6 min read

Jane Austen‘s most excellent fan club

The very fine authors who draw inspiration from Jane.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A book cover with a handwritten title that reads: Jane Austen volume the first

Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash.

250 years after Jane Austen’s birth, her stories are still an incredibly significant part of our culture. The annual Jane Austen Festival in Bath is gearing up to be bigger than ever; Winchester Cathedral is set to unveil a new statue of Austen later this year; and – perhaps most controversially – Netflix has announced yet another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Historically, there’s been an overwhelming focus on two elements of Austen’s writing: the Regency setting, and the romance plots. There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying these two aspects of her novels. I know I do. But this comes at the risk of underestimating the richness of Austen’s literary legacy. The internet is littered with listicles and blog posts in the format of ‘What to Read Next If You Love Jane Austen.’ Some of these lists will point you to other nineteenth-century literary classics. Others will home in on the romance element, recommending Helen Fielding’s wildly successful Bridget Jones’s Diary, Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, or even Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series.

I’d like to share with you an alternative and more eclectic list of books that I’ve fallen in love with as a lifelong Austen fan. Only one of these books is set in the Regency era; some have a romance as a major part of the plot, others don’t; some share Austen’s realistic writing style, one borders on magical realism. But I think each of these novels or authors brings out a fascinating and often overlooked aspect of Austen’s literary inheritance.

Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Austen is regularly compared to Charlotte Brontë, who famously wrote Jane Eyre, but I think her younger sister Anne is a fairer comparison. Writing only a few decades after Austen’s death in 1817, Brontë’s style is closer to Austen’s realism than to her own sister Charlotte’s use of gothic tropes and supernatural themes. Like Austen, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – as well as in her other novel, Agnes Grey – she focuses on simple language and engaging dialogue. Austen and Brontë also share a deep concern for female education. In several of her novels, notably Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Austen critiques the reality that many young women from middle-class and upper-class families were being taught to value ‘accomplishments’ like dancing and singing over any other form of education, with the aim of attracting a rich husband. Similarly, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Brontë’s heroine Helen criticises society’s belief that boys and girls should be educated differently, with boys being taught about the dangers and vices of the world, and girls being kept in ignorance of them. Helen thinks that this attitude makes girls more vulnerable to suffering and disappointment; I suspect Austen would have agreed.

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952)

Now somewhat forgotten, many of Pym’s stories are considered ‘novels of manners’, that is, novels that detail the costumes and values of a particular sphere of society at a particular time in history: in Austen’s case, the middle and upper classes in Regency England; in Pym’s case, the parishioners of a typical Anglican community in post-World War II London. Like Austen, Pym’s writing style is incredibly witty, and both writers favour everyday stories about ordinary people. In fact, Pym took the title Excellent Women from a phrase used by Austen in her unfinished novel Sanditon. These so-called ‘excellent women’ perform seemingly unheroic, small duties for others, the kind that may well go unnoticed, but which are often indispensable in small communities. In Pym’s novel, the first-person narrator, Mildred Lathbury, spends her life between working at a charitable organisation and helping and helping the priest at her local Anglican church. Mildred’s work is often taken for granted, much like the heroine of Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Eliot, whose family are remarkably ungrateful for all the ways in which she eases their burdens. Novels like Pym’s rightly celebrate the quiet bravery of the women who devote their lives to serving others.

P. D. James’ Death Comes to Pemberley (2011)

Detective fiction is not the first thing that crosses my mind when I think about Jane Austen. And yet, in a 1998 talk to the Jane Austen Society titled ‘Emma Considered as a Detective Story’, novelist P. D. James made a compelling case that Austen should be considered a precursor to the genre. James argued that a detective novel isn’t defined by the discovery of a murder (nobody dies in Dorothy Sayers’ acclaimed Gaudy Night, for example), but by the unveiling of a mystery. In Emma, Austen scatters clues for us readers along the way but withholds enough information as to keep us – and Emma herself – in the dark. When it’s revealed that Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill have been lying to hide their secret engagement for the entirety of the novel’s timeline, Emma realises how much she’s been deceived, and it’s this theme of deception that really links Austen’s novel to the detective genre. Yeas after her talk, James ended up writing a detective fiction sequel to a different Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice. Death Comes to Pemberley takes place six years after Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s wedding. A man is found dead on the grounds of Pemberley and Mr. Wickham is the prime suspect. I won’t say any more. It’s my favourite retelling of an Austen novel.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015)

The Buried Giant tells the tale of a Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, as they set out on a quest to find their long-lost son in a post-Arthurian England where people struggle with the loss of long-term memories. Ishiguro blends a very realistic portrayal of the relationship between a married couple with magical elements such as the presence of a dragon whose breath causes forgetfulness. On paper, this is also not an obvious recommendation, yet memory is a crucial theme for Austen. Persuasion is centred around Anne Eliot’s memories of her broken engagement to Captain Wentworth, which simultaneously bring her happiness and suffering. Mansfield Park’s heroine, Fanny Price, has an equally complex relationship with her past. She often she misses her childhood home, yet part of her is glad that she was taken to be raised by the Bertram family at Mansfield Park, a place which she loves in spite of painful memories of being mistreated by her Aunt Norris. Fanny thinks of memory as the most wonderful faculty of human nature, as it can be at times incredibly ‘retentive’, at others ‘bewildered’ and beyond our control. Ishiguro would surely agree, as that’s precisely what The Buried Giant is about: the ways in which memory can both fail us and yet give us hope, recall suffering and yet brings us closer to those we love.

It’s hard to overestimate Austen’s impact on the literary world. And while she’s sparked a revival in literature set in the Regency era, it’s also fascinating to see how she’s influenced writers working in seemingly very different genres from her. Anne Brontë’s novels may be darker in tone, but they show very similar concerns to Austen’s, especially when it comes to virtue and education. Barbara Pym wrote Excellent Women over a century after Austen’s death, yet shared Austen’s interest in highlighting the joys and sorrows of ordinary life. P. D. James found inspiration in Austen despite her own background being in detective fiction. And Ishiguro, despite writing novels ranging from dystopian science fiction to magical realism, has mentioned Austen as an inspiration.

If you’ve already read all of Austen’s novels, read them again – no one writes quite like her. But once you’ve reread them all, why not try one of these novels next? They may illuminate a side of Austen’s writing that you’ve missed before.

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