Reviews of The History Boys film

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 11/18/06 at 11:36am

Rex Reed:

The History Boys is one of the best, most reverent, comprehensive and seamless transfers from stage to screen ever made. Recreating their original assignments for England’s National Theatre and Broadway, Alan Bennett’s adaptation of his own Tony Award–winning play, and Nicholas Hytner’s direction of it, are literate, intelligent, profound and a huge entertainment. All of the original cast members have made it to film, not only with their charisma intact but with even more wit and intensity than the confining angle of a proscenium stage could make visible. I wanted it to go on forever.

http://www.observer.com/20061120/20061120_Rex_Reed_culture_rexreed.asp

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Variety:

"The History Boys" may please fans of the original legit production and the stragglers who didn't catch it in Gotham or London's West End. However, auds coming cold to this largely faithful adaptation of Alan Bennett's clever but contrived classroom comedy won't be so wowed, given pic's irrevocably stagy feel. Nicholas Hytner's flat-footed direction doesn't help, nor do pic's younger cast members' over-rehearsed perfs, although the seasoned thesps shine. Hard-marketing push and Bennett's name should reap interest from Blighty's chattering classes when it opens in the U.K. on Oct. 13, but "History" may struggle to push beyond sophisticated urban centers upon Stateside release Nov. 22.

http://www.variety.com/awardcentral_review/VE1117931824.html?nav=reviews07&categoryid=2352&cs=1&p=0

[MrMidwest]

Posted: 11/18/06 at 11:55am

Guardian:

Most films about schooldays are American and concerned with who'll take whom to the prom, who'll fix the school bully, who'll score the decisive touchdown. Few have much to do with education. Indeed only a couple come readily to mind - the Hollywood version of Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green in which a Welsh miner's son is encouraged to go to Oxford by an inspirational schoolmistress, and of course Dead Poets Society. That's why the film version of Alan Bennett's The History Boys is special, though certainly not the only reason. It's been thoughtfully brought to the screen with its National Theatre cast intact and with the same director, Nicholas Hytner, who made his movie debut 12 years ago with The Madness of King George, based on another National Theatre play by Bennett. - Philip French

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,1922571,00.html


There can't be many people under 40 for whom the lost convention of the "seventh-term" Oxbridge exam means anything, and even among the over-40s, it isn't exactly a cultural touchstone, like the 11-plus. But until 20 years ago, this was how post-A-level teenagers at top schools prepared for the now abolished entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities: they came back after the summer for one more term of cramming - sometimes in a daringly relaxed, proto-collegiate style - before sitting the papers just before Christmas. It is this arena of callow and precocious learning in which Alan Bennett set his smash-hit 2004 play about a bunch of bright young lads at a Sheffield grammar school, going all out for Oxbridge glory.

This has now been turned into a stagey and oddly contrived movie directed by Nick Hytner, with the kind of elaborate, highly worked dialogue that is exhilarating in the theatre, but rather unreal-sounding on the big screen. It is set, notionally, in the early 1980s, though Bennett's mental picture of the scene is surely from decades further back than that. There are some 80s pop songs on the soundtrack and modernised touches that appear to overshoot the period runway; we get talk of "media studies" (for the Oxbridge term? in the early 80s?) and the boys invoke their "rights" when a master casually whacks them over the head with some exercise books. - Peter Bradshaw

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,1920636,00.html

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 11/20/06 at 9:15pm

The Times is Mostly Positive:

"The movie is a streamlined adaptation of the National Theater production in London, which was heaped with praise when it arrived on Broadway in April for a limited engagement. Although minor characters have been added (including a religious gym teacher) and scenes excised, the film retains the play’s quicksilver pace along with an airiness and cheek that vaguely recall the ’60s films of Richard Lester.

The film was created by the same hands who made the play, including Mr. Bennett, who adapted the script, and the director Nicholas Hytner. The actors playing the eight students are the same ones who originated the roles in London, then brought them to New York. If they seem a little old for the parts, they make a seamless ensemble.

Transferred to the screen with its language intact, “The History Boys” inevitably feels less like a movie than like an academic vaudeville show. In one scene the students converse comically in French. Interwoven with the serious monologues are vintage popular songs (“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”) and scenes from old movies (“Now, Voyager” and “Brief Encounter”) performed by the students with a deadpan playfulness. If these songs and re-enacted film bits seem anachronistic choices for a movie set in the 1980s (the soundtrack includes period rock by the Clash and other groups), without its breezy horseplay “The History Boys” would come across as a drier, English answer to “Dead Poets Society.”

The acting is wonderful. Mr. Moore’s avid Irwin and Mr. Griffiths’s shambling Hector are matched by the extraordinary Frances de la Tour as Dorothy Lintott, the droopy, horse-faced history teacher with a baritone voice who is the wisest and most balanced member of an academic triumvirate. Dorothy belatedly has her say when she observes with an amused exasperation: “History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. History is women following behind with the bucket.”

All this verbal dexterity should awaken in viewers a wistful Anglophilic envy. How often do the most articulate characters in American films express themselves with such finesse?

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For all its delights, “The History Boys” is not a world-changing work of art. It is exactly what Irwin calls history: entertainment, a scintillating contrivance that is only as good as its epigrams. Below the surface lies a gooey custard filling.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/movies/21hist.html

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 11/20/06 at 9:41pm

Lots of other reviews tallied here:

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/historyboys?q=history%20boys

The overall "metacritic score" at this point is 75 which is pretty solid, though the highest score is only an 80/100.