Director Nicholas Hytner brings Alan Bennett's London and Broadway smash to the screen with the original stage actors and brings out the frisky best in all of them. Set in 1983, the story concerns eight students at a Yorkshire school being pressured to get into elite universities. The pragmatic Mr. Irwin (an A-plus for Stephen Campbell Moore) sees passing the entrance exams as performance art. Hector (Richard Griffiths), the general-studies teacher, puts the emphasis on learning — that is, when he's not teasing the boys in class or copping a feel on his motorcycle. Griffiths, an actor of expansive girth and talent, is a dynamo who finds every shade of humor and heartbreak in the role. He's especially poignant in his scenes with Samuel Barnett, as a gay misfit who pines for Dominic Cooper's straight object of lust for wankers. Cooper and Barnett are in the making, and Frances de la Tour as the grande dame fed up with teaching "centuries of masculine ineptitude" is a droll, dazzling wonder. The film can't hide its stage origins, and in cutting almost an hour on the journey from stage to screen some resonance is lost. But Bennett's dialogue sparkles and skewers with killer wit. Dig in.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."