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!

Article

Community

Culture

Film & TV

Identity

22 September 2025

5 min read

What makes us human?

We've more in common with our ancient ancestors than we might like to think

Claire Williams

Claire Williams is a theologian investigating women’s spirituality and practice. She lecturers at Regents Theological College.

A re-enactment of an ancient 'caveman' family sitting around a camp fire.

A dramatic reconstruction of a Neanderthal family.

BBC Studios.

I recently caught up on iPlayer with the excellent BBC series Human. In it, the paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi explores 300,000 years of human evolution over five beautifully shot, evocatively presented episodes. I was transfixed by the story of these ancient human societies - of Homo habilis; Homo erectus; the hobbit-like Homo floresiensis - and of the ways that paleoanthropologists and archaeologists study the multiple human species. They walk barefoot in deep pits with what look like tiny paint brushes to dust off their finds. They are endlessly patient, and delighted at tiny scraps that I would overlook as rubbish. They see in these fragments stories of ancient lives that lived, ate, loved and died so long ago.

Take a set of footsteps fossilised into the ground in White Sands, New Mexico, discernible through their impact and weight distribution. They are thought to be those of a woman walking at speed, probably, scholars think, carrying a child. Now and again these footsteps appear to stop and stand, and in-between the right and the left foot are a small set of footprints. The mother appears to have put down the child for a moment before picking him or her back up and starting again.

This was so familiar to me, a mother of four. It reminded me of all the times I’d carried toddlers around on my hip before giving up, plonking them on the floor and then switching sides. This very human urge to care for our children, and to get tired by them, echoed through time. Although luckily for me I did not have a giant sloth chasing me, as this ancient mother seems to have done.

But the flip side of the ability to love is the ability to also reject. And the series highlighted that this less pleasant human habit – the exclusion of others – appears to be an equally core part of our existence.

Al-Shamahi asks,

‘what must it have been like to have been a hybrid child... Did these children feel like they belonged or were they teased and ostracised?’

Behind her question is a sense of deep concern about the hybrid children’s welfare all those millenia ago.

Fast forward thousands of years. Most of us went to school and know what it feels like to either be different or see someone else who is different. Imagine if a modern-day Homo sapien/neanderthalensis hybrid turned up the local primary school, would it be okay? Unlikely. We don’t look after difference particularly well. The question Al-Shamahi posed seems pertinent today as well as in palaeoanthropology terms, what would it be like to grow up a hybrid? For us today the question is similar, how do we judge what is human? Is our human status founded in the horror and aversion to difference?

The drive to surround ourselves with similarity and force others to fit is sometimes called ‘the cult of normalcy’. This behaviour only tolerates people who look, act, and represent what is familiar to you. I experience this as a neurodivergent person struggling at times to feel ‘normal’. That is why the story of hybrid children is affectively impactful. Their struggle is easy to imagine, how do they fit in?. What makes them and us human?

The little story of a mother and a child being carried (minus the sloth part) is enchanting. Is it this love for children that makes the ancient people count as human? Is it the presence of a relationship and the assumed communication between individuals that makes them human?

The risk here is to say that all people who are in families, who are parents, are the prime example of humanity and that does not fit with many lives that we would want to count as human. Love may be essential, but it cannot be a prescriptive type or circumstance. Nevertheless, the allure of love and community is strong in Human and my response to it. That familiarity with the feeling of exclusion of the hybrid child and the story of the mother and child are common. They are experiences that we can relate to concerning community and care. The series shows these human species in relationship groups, with evidence of successful community and unsuccessful community (again a familiar trait). So far, that ability to love is also the same ability to reject, to cast out the hybrid or the different human. That is unsatisfactory as the trait of what is core to humans despite the likelihood of it being at the heart of the human story.

What, then of religion? These ancient peoples who lived before language and writing yet still worshipped – their practices evident from paintings found on the walls of caves. Is this what it means to be finally human? Was it, I thought, when they demonstrated language? Was it the early signs of religion and worship? Was it to do with thinking and rationalising, deciding upon a set of gods and the rules about them? However, this cannot be. For there are people today who do not speak through choice or disability. There are those who cannot demonstrate their ability to worship, for the same reasons. Rationalising cannot be the way in which we determine humanity, for then are children, or the intellectually disabled not human? If awareness of the sacred is what makes us human, then that limits those whose cognitive abilities are different.

Christians believe that what makes us human is the image of God in us. But what is that image? It is given to humans when God made them right at the beginning of things. It is the divine something that sets us apart from trees and plants, even animals. It is a quality that God gives to humans in the creative act of making them. It is not something that humans do for themselves but something they receive from God. Could it be applied to Neanderthals or early human species? I think so. Although these early species were very different in some respects to us, they had the features of humanity that count. They had relationships, the capacity to experience awe and wonder and they loved one another (like the mother and child). The image of God could be many things but one thing is certain, it a gift from God because of his love for humans. The need for love, community and worship that is in all of us points back to this. We love one another because we are first loved by God and that is what makes us human.

Human Trailer - The Untold Story of our Human Origins - BBC

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