An Education (Lone Scherfig, 2009)

Spanning the divide between coming-of-age drama, kitchen sink and romance, An Education provides a fully rounded portrait of a teenage suburban girl in the '60s with bohemian dreams whose head is sent spinning by the interest of a worldly older man and the escape he offers her from a drab predestined course laid out by her schoolmistresses and parents.

There's nothing remarkable in the set-up itself: the pleasure is all in Scherfig's realisation of a more complex protagonist than merely a naive dippy adolescent or a straightforward rebel against authority, and Carey Mulligan's nuanced performance fully matches the brief. The rest of the cast and the unorthodox handling of superficially run-of-the-mill scenes measure up likewise, and, barring a few uncertain lurches towards parody, mostly centered on Alfred Molina's turn as the pedantic father, it gels together unforcedly.

7/10