Synopsis
The story of an unruly class of bright, funny history students at a Yorkshire grammar school in pursuit of an undergraduate place at Oxford or Cambridge. Bounced between their maverick English master, a young and shrewd teacher hired to up their test scores, a grossly out-numbered history teacher, and a headmaster obsessed with results, the boys attempt to pass.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Samuel AndersonCrowther
- Dominic CooperDakin
- James CordenTimms
- Richard GriffithsHector
- Samuel BarnettPosner
- Russell ToveyRudge
- Jamie ParkerScripps
- Andrew KnottLockwood
- Sacha DhawanAkhtar
- Stephen Campbell MooreIrwin
Recommendations
- 80
Village Voice
The film version of The History Boys is a lesser thing, more fixed in space and time and rendered almost unbearably "cinematic" in patches by Hytner's gymnastic camerawork. Yet the ideas and feelings of the piece remain so rich that it almost doesn't matter. - 80
New York Magazine (Vulture)
The movie is brilliant and infectious, much like Bennett's voice: English-deadpan but never snide, and generous to a fault. - 80
The New Yorker
Revved by the stage performances, the cast courses through the material with disciplined exuberance--especially the eight young actors at the center of the drama, many of whom have never appeared in a film before. - 80
The New York Times
The current of intellectual energy snapping through the ferociously engaging screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play feels like electrical brain stimulation. - 75
Rolling Stone
The film can't hide its stage origins, and in cutting almost an hour on the journey from stage to screen some resonance is lost. But Bennett's dialogue sparkles and skewers with killer wit. Dig in. - 75
USA Today
The History Boys is an erudite, sharply written film with consummate performances, but its origins on the stage are all too obvious. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked the play and the compelling ideas Bennett kicks around, the movie makes for an intellectually invigorating couple of hours. - 63
TV Guide Magazine
Now seen for the first time in close-up, these "boys" are well past adolescence, which makes Bennett's sympathy for poor Hector a bit easier to take.
