Going back to school is rarely a pleasant experience. The forced socialization, mind-numbing routine and clockwork wedgies are enough to discourage any speck of enthusiasm. To help mentally prepare those who have to go back and to assist masochistic readers who want to revisit those painful experiences, Fast Forward has prepared a miniature back-to-school film festival. Think of it as a capper to your summer reading.
    • THE 400 BLOWS (1959, dir. Francois Truffaut)
    This lyrical, autobiographical film shows a 14-year-old French boy escaping from everything that school represents. What sets Truffaut’s film apart from others in the genre is its unsentimental sensitivity to its subject and the strength of its simplicity — it simultaneously represents the trailing edge of Italian neorealism and the birth of the French New Wave.
    The 400 Blows is one of the truest depictions of the conflict between restless imagination and what someone memorably described as “the state-sponsored manufactories of echoes.” If the story is not one that we have all lived, it is certainly one that most of us have imagined living. (TIMOTHY HECK)
    • BATMAN BEGINS (2005, dir. Christopher Nolan)
    If life has one absolute truth, it’s that Batman is cooler than you could ever hope to be, so it holds that his school would be proportionately cooler than yours as well. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) goes to ninja school and fights Liam Neeson with a sword before blowing up his house, because that’s just how motherfucking hard he is. If that doesn’t make Begins the best “school” movie ever, then the inclusion of the wonderful Gary Oldman should. That, and the fact Begins has about 60 times more appearances of Batman than all the other films on this list combined. (KYLE FRANCIS)
    • BETTER OFF DEAD (1985, dir. Savage Steve Holland)
    Possibly the only teen comedy to make a running gag of the main character’s suicide attempts, Better Off Dead may not have launched first-time director Savage Steve Holland’s feature film career, but it did establish one of the most darkly whimsical suburbs ever put on celluloid. There are some typical high school-flick elements — girl troubles and the big ski-off between the jock and the geek — but with a pair of drag-racing, Howard Cosell-imitating Japanese immigrants, an army of homicidal newspaper boys and a musical number starring a claymation hamburger, no one can accuse Holland of sticking to clichés. Still, it’s John Cusack’s obsessive, depressed Lane Meyer who best captures everything you wish you could forget about the high school experience. (PETER HEMMINGER)
    • BRICK (2005, dir. Rian Johnson)
    Not every schoolyard flick finds its characters trying desperately to get laid or win the big game. Setting film noir in a high school, writer-director Rian Johnson’s Brick converts adolescent melodrama into a darkly criminal underworld. If that conceit can be called clever (the film’s execution certainly can’t be faulted), it can’t be called unfitting. After all, who could better pull off the weighty self-importance of a hard-boiled detective’s voiceover narration than a high school student?
    Rock ’n’ roll, goth and emo have all used their esthetics to define rebellion. Why not noir, with its beat-up fedoras and trench coats? A good chunk of the disenfranchised already own the latter. (JEFF KUBIK)
    • CARRIE (1976, dir. Brian De Palma)
    Who hasn’t wanted to burn down their high school with all of their teenage torturers inside? Brian De Palma’s Carrie scared the hell out of audiences back in 1976 with its oft-imitated shock ending, religious mania and a bucket of pig’s blood. Now, it’s best remembered as a portrait of tortured adolescence, with young Carrie (the great speckled elf, Sissy Spacek) taking delicious revenge (albeit with murderous psychic powers) against her high school torturers. The symbolism is pretty obvious (the movie opens with Carrie getting her period and being pelted with tampons, it ends with her bathed in blood; telekinesis manifesting itself as sexual repression), but De Palma’s pacing and style are so carefully crafted it’s transparent. (BRYN EVANS)
• SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003, dir. Richard Linklater)
    If you have to go back to school, make it the School of Rock. In Linklater’s best film, Jack Black plays die-hard, down-and-out guitarist Dewey Finn, a man so desperate to rock, he fakes his way into a prep school to get well-off pre-teens to back him in a battle of the bands. He may be a grade-grubber’s worst nightmare, but Black’s laissez-faire turn as a slacker substitute teacher, written expressly for him by Mike White, is outrageous, heartwarming and fall-down funny. It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ’n’ roll. (JASON LEWIS)
    • THREE O’CLOCK HIGH (1987, dir. Phil Joanou)
    This smart, funny, inventive film takes a look at one day in the life of a meek high school student named Jerry (Casey Siemaszko) as the minutes count down to an unavoidable schoolyard brawl between him and a terrifying bully (Richard Tyson). The day turns increasingly nightmarish and surreal as each one of Jerry’s attempts to get out of the scheduled fight makes the situation worse. If the Coen brothers ever made a high school movie, it would look like Three O’Clock High. (JOHN TEBBUTT)