| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

| Original Score: 3/6 | Feb 3, 2007

If you like your British movies quick, raunchy, reflective, and bittersweet, then The History Boys is for you.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 30, 2006

The film becomes a sermonette on tolerance. But with its one-sidedness, it fails to practice what it preaches.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 22, 2006

The History Boys is a movie that asks questions like 'What is education really for anyway?' and asks them in an altogether witty, brainy way. It turns history into what it really is, the story of our lives.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 22, 2006

Full of energy, ideas and fine acting.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Dec 21, 2006

The History Boys boasts a dazzling verbal cleverness%u2014the gleeful rat-a-tat of snappy banter expertly executed%u2014that doesn't keep it from also being deeply, exquisitely sad.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 17, 2006

...It's a rare pleasure to see a film that assumes literacy on the part of its audience.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 15, 2006

There are no spontaneous moments on screen: The characters aren't reacting to each other; they're waiting for the cut to deliver a line they've had memorized since [the play] played the London National.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 15, 2006

The History Boys is best when it crackles with the passion of ideas about the function and importance of ... ideas.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 15, 2006

Although grounded in the fact-based world of academia, The History Boys offers little of substance.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 15, 2006

[An] exuberantly free-spirited but faithful movie version of Alan Bennett's masterful hit play about education, class, sex, love, death, memory and that often equally fantastical thing we call history.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 8, 2006

This is achingly perceptive writing that director Nicholas Hytner, working with the same superb cast that performed in London and on Broadway, brings to life.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 8, 2006

The movie was made while the actors were still performing the stage version, and they modulate their performances for the screen admirably, even if the film is not quite as engaging as the play.

| Dec 7, 2006

If you take The History Boys as a filmed record of a somewhat unexpected stage phenom foremost, chances are you'll relax into and let some performers take it from there.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 7, 2006

... offers a sharp critique of the means and measures of education.

| Dec 7, 2006

There's no one today writing English dialogue as sharp as Bennett's, and hearing it delivered expertly is a pleasure worth sitting through some dodgy montages for.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 28, 2006

It gave me the creeps.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2006

Flunks its most crucial test: the need to properly adapt a stage play to the screen medium.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 24, 2006

It's chatty, it's wordy, but a passion for the well-written word lies at the thematic heart of the thing, and cinematic flourishes would only clog the arteries.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 24, 2006