Reviews
The Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
"Invariably funny and inexpressibly moving in the way it looks at a young girl's journey from innocence to experience, "An Education" does so many things so well, it's difficult to know where to begin when cataloging its virtues. What's easy is knowing where you'll end up, which is marveling, like everyone else, at the performance by Carey Mulligan that is the film's irreplaceable centerpiece. "
09/10/2009
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
"Jenny is not just a silly girl. She represents Britain emerging from the austerity of the post-war era and experiencing the dangerous allure of entrepreneurial capitalism and the Swinging Sixties. Her story is our story. "
30/10/2009
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The Mirror
Mark Adams
"The thoroughly delightful and beautifully observed An Education is one of the very best British films of the year, and features a real star-in-the-making performance from young Carey Mulligan."
25/10/2009
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The Times
Toby Young
"Being a film critic can be a dispiriting job sometimes, particularly if you love movies. So many of the ones you have to sit through each week are so terrible. Then a film such as An Education comes along and restores your faith. This is a wonderful, life-affirming picture that deserves all the prizes it will undoubtedly win. I can’t call it the best British film of the year because it’s still only October. But I’d be amazed if a better one comes along."
30/10/2009
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The Spectator
Deborah Ross
"My only niggle, perhaps, is that the role of Jenny’s mother seems rather underwritten. All she seems to do is strike a look somewhere between pride and panic while doing a lot of washing up. But that is only a niggle, and An Education is an absolute gem. Am I the first to say that? Probably not, but at least you now know it is true."
28/10/2009
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Variety
Todd McCarthy
"A celebration of intellectual curiosity and personal adventure through a portrait of 16-year-old English girl’s questionable romance with a man twice her age, “An Education” is a wonderful film. "
21/09/2009
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Channel 4 Film
Richard Luck
"Indeed, while you'd hesitate to call it edgy, it'll be a strange person who doesn't find An Education entertaining, and a stranger man still who denies it the success it's sure to enjoy."
16/02/2010
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The Guardian
Andrew O'Hagan
"This isn’t a dark movie with world-historical events ripping up the screen. It is something much better than that — a sensitive and sometimes quiet movie with a perfectly rendered shock at its centre."
30/10/2009
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The Financial Times
Nigel Floyd
"Barber, famed today as a wittily unsentimental newspaper interviewer, may have had her urbane savagery honed by this true-life narrative, which mixes Lolita with St Trinian’s, adding a dash of Gustave Flaubert."
28/10/2009
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"Seen from a certain angle, that could look like misery-lit, a story of sex abuse and class shame, were it not for the fact that it is extremely funny. Hornby's screenplay catches the stranger-than-fiction absurdity nicely, and, although he softens the most excruciating moment from Barber's book, his script gives the audience a clear view of the painful delusions of all concerned."
29/10/2009
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The Independent
Geoffrey MacNab
"This is a small film but an acutely well-observed and well-acted one that benefits from Mulligan's performance, sly and affecting by turns, as the teenager growing up in early 1960s London suburbia and having an affair with a much older man."
21/10/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
"As for the smokey-voiced Carey Mulligan, she is undoubtedly the British find we've been reading about – wry, radiant, pertly oddball in looks – but the film puts her too much in pride of place on its mantelpiece. The editing could have omitted a few of those throaty chuckles, while the photography never misses a chance to highlight the ironic dimple by her mouth: Mulligan is barely given a moment's break from charming us into falling for her."
01/11/2009
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Time Out
Dave Calhoun
"Journalist Lynn Barber’s spiky memoir of striking up a relationship with an older man in early 1960s west London has been turned into an accessible comedy romance by screenwriter Nick Hornby that seems designed to play extraordinarily well in the very same privet-lined streets it describes."
29/10/2009
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The Times
Kevin Maher
"For not since the heydays of Hollywood has an actress appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and assured herself of a super-stratospheric future via a single commanding performance."
31/10/2009
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"You know that elephant in the room, the one everyone tries to ignore? Well, this film has one of those. But the elephant in An Education doesn’t just stand there in the very structure of the film. No, it breaks wind, it defecates, it howls and then takes a bow — and still the film carries on as if there’s no elephant..."
01/11/2009
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Total Film
Neil Smith
"Elsewhere Alfred Molina is splendid as Jenny’s dad, a blustering buffoon readily taken in by David’s easy charm, while Sally Hawkins has a small but telling cameo late in the story. Ultimately, though, this is Mulligan’s film, the 24-year-old starlet stealing our hearts as surely as Audrey Hepburn did half a century ago with a performance of dimpled sweetness and impish precocity."
22/10/2009
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Sight & Sound
Kate Stables
"The even-handedness that makes this adaptation a model of sophistication also loses something of the memoir's sheer enduring rage. Where Barber is caustic about the damage caused to her by all the adults involved, the film's sleek comic treatment has made its vivacious young heroine almost impregnable, a step that even smart-mouthed Juno shunned."
16/02/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Sukhdev Sandhu
"The ending, although it sticks pretty closely to Barber’s memoir, is a whisker away from veering into Billy Elliot territory. Still, this is a delightful, resonant film, a great advertisement for Scherfig’s self-effacing, but socially probing, directorial style, and a beguiling introduction to Mulligan, whom we will soon be seeing a lot more of."
29/10/2009
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
"While the camera swoons over Jenny, and Hornby's script places unchallenged compliments about her on every character's lips, she comes across as an insufferable wretch to the audience, despite Mulligan's button-bright performance. Jenny's development and disillusionment aren't nearly as affecting as that of her calcified parents, Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour), who are dying slowly of self-loathing in Twickenham... The Danish director Lone Scherfig has a light touch with her actors, but the film suffers from a complete absence of present tense: it's shot
in NostalgiaVision."
29/10/2009
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The New Yorker
David Denby
"Peter Sarsgaard gives his best performance yet as David Goldman, a London hustler of enormous charm who zips around town in a maroon sports car, and who seduces, slowly and patiently, a very bright sixteen-year-old girl..."
26/10/2009
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The Observer
Philip French
"Danish director Lone Scherfig seems at home in Britain and the details of clothes, haircuts and so on are dead right. The period comes uncannily back as Jenny lies in her bedroom listening to a Juliette Gréco LP (France was then the acme of cultural sophistication) playing on a Dansette record player. The horrors of lower-middle-class suburbia, intended no doubt subjectively to suggest Jenny's revulsion and alienation, are rather caricatured in the performance of Alfred Molina as her humourless, insecure, bullying father."
01/11/2009
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The Evening Standard
Nick Curtis
"Young actress Carey Mulligan is the real revelation in this slim, nicely crafted exploration of the social strictures of Sixties London, extracted from journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir."
20/10/2009
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Empire Magazine
Dan Jolin
"A decent but unremarkable film with a big, unforgettable central performance. Carey Mulligan passes with First-Class Honours."
16/02/2010
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