An Education

Released in 2009, An Education was the Danish director Lone Scherfig's first English-language film of real prominence, after she emerged from the Dogme 95 movement with Italian for Beginners. The screenplay, by the novelist Nick Hornby, adapts a memoir by the British journalist Lynn Barber about her teenage years in early-1960s suburban London. The film premiered at Sundance, where it won the World Cinema audience and cinematography prizes, and went on to three Academy Award nominations.

Carey Mulligan, then in her early twenties and largely unknown, plays Jenny, a precocious schoolgirl whose Oxford-bound diligence is interrupted by David (Peter Sarsgaard), a worldly older man. Around them Scherfig assembles a remarkable British ensemble — Alfred Molina as Jenny's anxious father, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams — and shoots a tactile, jazz-scored vision of pre-Beatles London. Mulligan's performance, poised between adolescent certainty and dawning disillusion, made her a star overnight.

The film was widely praised for its wit and its refusal of easy moralising, and it earned Mulligan the BAFTA for Best Actress along with her Oscar nomination. It remains a touchstone of late-2000s British cinema and one of the sharpest coming-of-age films of its era — a portrait of a clever girl's education that takes place largely outside the classroom.