An Education

Released in 2009, An Education was the Danish director Lone Scherfig's first English-language film of real prominence; she had come out of 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. It 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. Scherfig surrounds them with a strong 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 gives Jenny's adolescent certainty real wit and intelligence, and the performance made her a star almost overnight.

Reviewers liked its wit and its refusal to moralise, and it won Mulligan the BAFTA for Best Actress to go with her Oscar nomination. It is one of the touchstones of late-2000s British cinema and one of the sharpest coming-of-age films of its era, the story of a clever girl whose real education happens mostly outside the classroom, in concert halls, jazz clubs and weekends in Paris.