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100This happens in 1961, when 16-year-old girls were a great deal less knowing than they are now. Yet the movie isn't shabby or painful, but romantic and wonderfully entertaining.
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100Hornby is a fine craftsman and his dialogue sparkles, though occasionally the scenes are too calculated.
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100The combination of a literate script, an adroit cast and an economical style is simple addition that achieves an alchemical feat: the best film of the year.
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100It is, in its quiet, precise, classical way, nearly perfect.
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100An Education captures the very limited possibilities for female liberation in early-'60s London -- with massive social change on the distant horizon, but not here yet -- in exquisite detail.
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100This is a performance, and a film, to cherish for this year and always.
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100This tale of an English schoolgirl's hard-won wisdom is thrilling --for the radiance of Carey Mulligan's Jenny, who's wonderfully smart and perilously tender; for the grace of Lone Scherfig's direction, and the brilliance of Nick Hornby's screenplay.
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91Afterward, you'll want to listen to the Beatles sing ''She's Leaving Home.'' It might be a girl like Jenny the lads had in mind.
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91An Education shares with Hornby’s best work trenchant insight into the way smart, hyper-verbal young people let the music, films, books, and art they love define themselves as they figure out who they are and what they want to be.
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91Bracingly perceptive about the human comedy.
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90Topped by a fine cast, a first-rate script by Nick Hornby and tight direction by Lone Scherfig, the film is a smart, moving but not inaccessible entry in the coming-of-age canon.
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90Technical elements are among the best this year. Photography, editing, music, production design, and costumes all add seamless period flavor to the puritanical stew that was London almost a half-century ago.
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89A distinctive story with universal appeal.
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88An Education is remarkable for the traps it doesn't fall into. Jenny, for all her naive impulses, isn't a victim.
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88The film version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came out in the year in which An Education is set, and beyond the hairstyles, there’s something of the willful, gleeful Golightly reinvention expert about Jenny.
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88The film wouldn't work at all, though, if Sarsgaard didn't strike the perfect balance between snaky predator and love-struck fool.
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88Despite the lingering aroma of Victorian rot shrouding 1961, An Education is excitingly young.
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88Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned in school with that learned from life.
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88Through stellar performances, clever writing and exquisite cinematography, the story is fresh and thoroughly captivating.
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88In the end, this is more a character study of Jenny than a tale of tortured love, and a reminder that any education worth having comes with its share of trauma.
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88It's a career-making performance that relies as much on charm as on acting ability -- and Mulligan has both.
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80Watch Mulligan's face as she goes from weary to awakened, and see it all come together.
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Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
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80If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.
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80As she's being put through her Oxford-prep paces, Jenny complains about "ticking off boxes," and at times, this film seems to be doing just that: coming-of-age drama, check. Youthful illusions shattered, check. But as with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile.
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80Carey Mulligan shines in a captivating performance.
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75Hornby's humane and humorous screenplay is true to the film's title: In short order, young Jenny finds out important truths about identity, glamour and how adults really think and live.
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A beguiling little film that, with deceptive restraint and forthrightness, opens up worlds of roiling, contradictory emotions.
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75Best of all, An Education isn’t alarmist. It knows other people can’t seduce us if we don’t seduce ourselves first and that Jenny is level-headed enough to handle it and learn.
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70For all its original touches, though, An Education follows a conventional trajectory.
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70An Education is perceptive and entertaining, but it doesn’t have the jolting vitality of, say, “Notes on a Scandal,” which dramatized an even more unconventional liaison--older woman, fifteen-year-old boy.
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This British drama is handsomely textured and beautifully acted, though the script often feels giddily out of touch with the essential creepiness of the scenario.
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60A decent but unremarkable film with a big, unforgettable central performance. Carey Mulligan passes with First-Class Honours.
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40Lone Scherfig directs it all as if it were a breezy lark, so a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 41 out of 50
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Mixed: 4 out of 50
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Negative: 5 out of 50
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JoelM.2
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GrafZ5It's well made and well acted, but after 40 or 50 minutes everything just falls apart. Or maybe it's just me tired of dumb moralizing.