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

War & peace

6 August 2025

5 min read

Nuclear War A Scenario: the book that imagines the inconceivable

It's the most depressing book that you really need to read

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A nuclear explosion glows red and orange against the night sky.

A test explosion, 1956.

Nuclear War A Scenario (Torva, 2024) by Annie Jacobsen is about the most depressing book you could ever read and, perversely, all the more reason to read it. Collectively, the human race has buried its head in the sand over the existence, power and proliferation of nuclear weapons. We are understandably focussed on the lasting impacts of climate change; however, nuclear war promises planetary destruction and the risks surrounding it have grown, rather than lessened, since the end of the Cold War.

To help us focus on what we would rather not, Annie Jacobsen gives her book a plausible but hypothetical scenario. It starts with North Korea, for there we have an unbalanced, remote individual; an empathy free despot with unfettered power and unimaginable weapons at his disposal that now have the capacity to reach the east coast of the United States.

We do not learn his reasons for launching missiles against the US in the scenario and never would, were it to happen, because Armageddon takes only minutes to unfold. Jacobsen is deeply informed round nuclear war, having talked to many highly placed American officials. One recurring anxiety she meets is that the decision to launch nuclear missiles is in the hands of the President alone and the US still operates on the so-called Launch on Warning doctrine.

Launch on Warning means America will fire its nuclear weapons once its early warning sensor systems merely warn of an impending nuclear attack. These systems are sophisticated, but they can also be wrong, as the US discovered in 1979 when it briefly believed it was under attack from the Soviet Union. In Jacobsen’s scenario, the President has six minutes to decide what measures to take and has something approximating a menu to assist with this. Ronald Reagan observed:

Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?

The menu, a little like ordering pizza with preferred toppings, is supposed to help with that moment.

In Jacobsen’s scenario, US nuclear weapons are unleashed against North Korea but have to travel over Russia to get there. Russia’s early warning systems are less sophisticated and in the scenario these US missiles are believed to be an attack on Russia, not North Korea. This leads to Russia’s own uncompromising, near instantaneous response which leads to … well, you get the picture.

A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonates at one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit, which is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the centre of the sun and creates a fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour. This alone is unimaginable; replicating it hundreds of times over is impossible. The injuries sustained among those left; the loss of food, water, sanitation; the breakdown of law and order; the arrival of nuclear winter where temperatures plummet for decades without any infrastructure led Nikita Khrushchev to say: ‘the survivors will envy the dead’.

Mark Lynas, a writer who for years has been helping the world to understand the science of climate change has recently turned his focus on the nuclear threat in his book ‘Six Minutes to Winter’. He observes:

‘There’s no adaptation options for nuclear war. Nuclear winter will kill virtually the entire human population. And there’s nothing you can do to prepare, and there’s nothing you can do to adapt when it happens, because it happens over the space of hours. It is a vastly more catastrophic, existential risk than climate change.’

Reaching the end of human capacity is an unsettling experience. Solutionism is the Valley’s mantra: technology can solve every human problem, but binary thinking neglects the social, political and moral complexity of many issues and, in any case, catastrophic nuclear explosions are as likely to happen by accident as design - and could do at any time. It’s not that we need more time for AI to resolve this existential threat; it’s that it never will.

This is where the moral strength of faith traditions come into play as people embrace the strange hope of the powerless. Christian faith in particular cannot succumb to fatalism or the hacking of the book of Revelation to interpret the end of all things as code for nuclear war. God is creator and we are co-creators with him; we are not called to destruction when he has promised to renew the face of the earth through the resurrection of Christ.

There is something specific about our generation. For eighty years, since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been the first generation with the capacity to destroy the whole world. Understandably, we do not want to think about this, but the fallout from this nuclear denial is that risks continue to multiply. More nations are thinking about developing nuclear weapons in an unstable world. In June 2025, the global nuclear watchdog, the IAEA said Iran was failing to meet its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in two decades and within days, Israel had launched missile strikes on Iranian nuclear sites – and many other targets – to set its nuclear programme back, followed in a significant escalation by US strikes. Nuclear weapons are a very present cause of insecurity, as the recent missile exchanges between India and Pakistan show so gravely.

Despots watched what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after he relinquished his designs on weapons of mass destruction following pressure from western powers and are unlikely to make the same mistake. No-one can be sure the current US administration will offer a nuclear umbrella to Europe, especially when the President’s instincts are not internationalist and his preoccupation is with a golden dome shielding continental America instead.

Almost no-one has agency in this, except for one vital piece of the puzzle: intercessory prayer, rooted in the promises of God. The ancient psalm writer prophesies:

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;

He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;

He burns the shields with fire.

Be still, and know that I am God!

I am exalted among the nations,

I am exalted in the earth.

And something greater than the spear is among us today.

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