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Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes
Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: A funny thing happened to The History Boys on the way to the screen. The players are the same, the dialogue is pretty much identical, but the vibrancy of the play -- its exhilarating immediacy -- has been muted. Read more
Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: ...It's a rare pleasure to see a film that assumes literacy on the part of its audience. Read more
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: 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. Read more
David Edelstein, 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. Read more
Rex Reed, New York Observer: The History Boys is one of the best, most reverent, comprehensive and seamless transfers from stage to screen ever made. Read more
Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: A thrillingly smart and immensely enjoyable screen version of Alan Bennett's celebrated play. Read more
Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper: It gave me the creeps. Read more
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Full of energy, ideas and fine acting. Read more
Nathan Rabin, AV Club: 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. Read more
Bill Muller, Arizona Republic: Although grounded in the fact-based world of academia, The History Boys offers little of substance. Read more
Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: 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. Read more
Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times: A lively and entertaining disquisition on the purpose and uses of knowledge in a world that cares less about scholarship than quantifiable results. Read more
J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: ... offers a sharp critique of the means and measures of education. Read more
Bruce Westbrook, Houston Chronicle: The film becomes a sermonette on tolerance. But with its one-sidedness, it fails to practice what it preaches. Read more
Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: Bennett captures the racy, joshing, embattled atmosphere inside a British boarding school better than anybody has done since Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version. Read more
Michael Booth, Denver Post: 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. Read more
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: The movie adaptation has been lifted from the theater with original cast and director Nicholas Hytner intact; the actors interact as cozily as chums on a playing field. Read more
Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: 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. Read more
Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News: The History Boys is best when it crackles with the passion of ideas about the function and importance of ... ideas. Read more
Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly: But if The History Boys arrives at a perilous moment for culture and learning, and if the news it brings isn't all good, it nevertheless instills in you hope for the youth of tomorrow. Read more
Jan Stuart, Newsday: Griffiths' brilliantly rumpled academic with recklessly roving hands is matched by the disarming Samuel Barnett as a sad-sack gay student, and the bull's-eye precise Frances de la Tour, a battle-weary standard bearer for feminist history. Read more
Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: The play, however, has been heavily cut and the boys blend together, as director Nicholas Hytner masses them in groups and Bennett provides only the barest of descriptions. Read more
Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: Even with multiple trips outdoors and crosstown gropes on Hector's motorcycle, The History Boys is a play pretending to be a movie. Read more
Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: Taking a production pretty much intact from stage to screen robs it of its surprises. The cast seems to know what's coming, and so do we. There's not a single moment where you sense 'discovery' taking place. Read more
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: The History Boys is hit-and-miss with each scene. There's no through line, in the sense that the audience never really is made to care about the things the characters care about. Read more
Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times: [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. Read more
Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: 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. Read more
Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Flunks its most crucial test: the need to properly adapt a stage play to the screen medium. Read more
Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine: It has a flow and an intimacy that the often awkward theatrical version lacked. Read more
Dave Calhoun, Time Out: [The film] offers a sly mix of broad comedy, tender wordplay and heartfelt subversion. Read more
Claudia Puig, USA Today: The History Boys is an erudite, sharply written film with consummate performances, but its origins on the stage are all too obvious. Read more
Leslie Felperin, Variety: 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. Read more
Peter Marks, Washington Post: 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. Read more