Summer Palace (2006)
Dir. Lou Ye
Starring Lei Hao
The first and so far only mainland Chinese film about the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, with full-frontal nudity and depictions of students having illicit sex. As in 1968, student power drove the rebellion, but the energy is not seen as overtly political or analytical, but rather emotional and sexual, as unruliness in student dorms spills out into the streets and into the vastness of the Square.
Horse Feathers (1932)
Dir. Norman McLeod
Starring the Marx Brothers
Madcap satire on the US college world and its obsession with sports glory, with Groucho as a college president miffed that his institution has never won a football game. His son (Zeppo) tells him to sneak some pros on to the team, but they wind up hiring a dog-catcher (Harpo) and a bootlegger (Chico) - with chaotic results.
Wild Strawberries (1957)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman
Starring Victor Sjöström
Bergman's great work stars Sjöström as the elderly widower Professor Borg, who drives across the country to his old university to collect an honorary degree, beset on the way by visions, reveries and premonitions that shed light on a life of coldness and emotional seclusion. A moving meditation on life choices.
Educating Rita (1983)
Dir. Lewis Gilbert
Starring Michael Caine, Julie Walters
Adapted by Willy Russell from his stage play, it stars Caine as the drunken, cynical English literature professor whose smug self-pity is overturned when a tough working woman, played by Walters, chivvies him into coaching her through an adult education course. Her ingenuous idealism and faith in education and self-betterment challenge Caine's boozy complacency.
Oleanna (1994)
Dir. David Mamet
Starring William H Macy, Debra Eisenstadt
Mamet takes liberal audiences way out of their comfort zone in a controversial piece in which Eisenstadt plays a student whose professor (Macy) has given her a failing grade. The student retaliates by flinging a charge of sexual harassment, which threatens to destroy his career.
I Flunked, But... (1930)
Dir. Yasujiro Ozu
Starring Tatsuo Saito
Silent movie in which Saito plays a student who plans to cruise through his finals by going in to the exam hall with a secret list of facts, dates, equations etc scribbled on his shirt. But this plan comes unstuck when the "matron" of his shared student house washes his shirt clean.
Accepted (2006)
Dir. Steve Pink
Starring Justin Long, Jonah Hill
A high school graduate (Long) fails to get into college, so creates a fake institution under whose name he sets up a bank account into which his parents can pay his tuition fees. Soon he and his other loser friends take over a disused mental institution where they gather as a self-governing student anti-elitist commune.
La Chinoise (1967)
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Starring Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud
Perhaps this film did not actually directly inspire the 1968 Paris uprising, but it's a fiercely potent part of the 1960s zeitgeist. A philosophy student (Wiazemsky) and her boyfriend (Léaud) establish a squatter Maoist cell devoted to revolutionary violence. A key scene shows Wiazemsky having a long conversation with her professor, doggedly but serenely arguing for terrorism as a valid act.
School Daze (1988)
Dir. Spike Lee
Starring Laurence Fishburne
Lee's campus comedy was a radical move in 1988: a film that dared to show African-American experience on its own terms, without reference to white communities and audiences. Fishburne plays Dap, an activist and demonstrator at an all-black university who sees everything in political terms. Lee himself plays Half-Pint, who just wants to be successful and get into the school's most prestigious fraternity.
Drive, He Said (1971)
Dir. Jack Nicholson
Starring Karen Black, Bruce Dern
An early-70s oddity and cult item directed by Nicholson, about a couple of college students whose lives are driven by neurosis, competition and fear. One is a freaky anti-establishment campaigner, terrified of being drafted for the Vietnam war: he winds up freeing all the animals in the experimental biology lab. The second is a basketball superstar whose possible pro career is preying on his mind - as is his affair with the wife of a college professor. It lacks structure, but shows something rarely dramatised about a student's existence: the restless, uncertain fretting about what will happen to them later.
