Nine film studies academics share their top picks of movies that feature academic life. From The Birds to Wicked, here are their recommendations.
Got a 10th choice? Share it with us in the comments below and on BlueSky, X or LinkedIn

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The Birds

Jacob Engelberg
Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture, Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

It’s perhaps masochistic of me to choose, in my consideration of academic life on film, an instance in which an academic is humiliated. We’re a group that likes to profess our expertise, but I’m drawn to this moment, from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), for its smarting reminder of the limitations of all our knowledge.

After the film’s central socialite, Melanie (Tippi Hedren), experiences an unexplained attack from a swarm of birds, she seeks refuge in a diner. There, she meets Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies), an erudite Englishwoman who assures Melanie that she doubts these birds “would have sufficient intelligence to launch a massed attack. Their brainpans are not big enough.” When Melanie challenges Mrs Bundy, the academic chides her: “Ornithology happens to be my avocation,” dismissing an attack as “impossible.” Later, she rebukes another patron: “Let’s be logical about this.”

Alas, Mrs Bundy’s logic – rooted in a cold utilitarianism – finds itself confounded upon witnessing a brutal bird attack, leaving scores dead. Cowering with others in a hallway, Mrs Bundy now avoids Melanie’s gaze, her ornithological expertise embarrassed in the face of its limitations.

In Mrs Bundy’s ignominy as the academic who knew too little, we’d be wise to remember the importance of academics remaining open to surprise. We must not mistake our expertise for the illusion of an ossified episteme. Indeed, a humble openness to bewilderment might be said to be learning’s very precondition. Without it, scholarship’s potential to challenge our most certain presuppositions could never be realised.

Torso / I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale

Gary Needham
Senior Lecturer in Film, University of Liverpool, UK

Set in the Universitáper Stranieri di Perugia in the Italian region of Umbria, familiar to any exchange students coming to Italy to learn the language and culture, Sergio Martino’s Torso (Italy 1973), to use its anglicised title, is a 1973 giallo, a uniquely Italian genre that muddies the distinctions between Agatha Christie-style whodunnit murder-mystery with horror conventions and titillations that would prefigure many of the American slashers to follow.

Torso begins in the lecture theatre, at the end of a class, with exchange student Jane, played by the British actress Suzy Kendall, catching up with her art history professor to challenge him on his inflexible interpretation of Perugino’s Saint Sebastian, the Christian martyr shot through with Roman arrows. Jane, having seen the painting in situ at the Louvre finds herself attached to its intensely spiritual aspects since it is the least bloody interpretations of the saint. “He was a painter not a butcher,” says Jane’s classmate Dani. A mere seven minutes into its runtime, night falls on Perugia and the first student meets their gory demise under the stilts of the elevated autostradas that cut through Italy’s post-war rural landscapes. As the rising student body count and academic red herrings accrue, Torso plays among the tensions of its sordid goriness within a literate intertextual web, benefiting from its academic setting, allowing us to ponder if the gialli is the work of butchers or painters. You have been warned!

Jurassic Park

James Chapman
Professor of Film Studies, University of Leicester, UK

Ever since Professor Challenger set out for an unnamed plateau somewhere in the Amazon basin, expeditions to lost worlds have been part of popular culture. With their narratives of exploration, discovery and revelation, lost-world adventures have been a particular favourite of mine –perhaps because they represent a sort of metaphor for academic work.

Take Jurassic Park (1993), for example. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel was a box-office blockbuster, becoming for a while the biggest-grossing movie in history. Much of the attraction of Jurassic Park was its state-of-the-art special effects, with computer generated imaging  (CGI) realising dinosaurs more realistically than any puppet or stop-motion animated model had ever done. But for me the real pleasure of the film is that academics are the heroes.

Jurassic Park pits two palaeontologists and a self-described chaotician against rampaging dinosaurs on an island theme park. It’s a film in which a protagonist’s academic knowledge is the key to survival. Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill), cut off from the rest of the island with two intelligent but understandably frightened youngsters, has to call upon his professional expertise to guide them to safety. As Richard Attenborough’s avuncular tycoon puts it: “They’ll be fine. Who better to get the children through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert?”

And the film also includes perhaps the best validation of academic research in movie history. Whatever our discipline – and it’s no less true in film history than other subjects – our research involves analysing sources that are fragmentary and incomplete: we never have every document, every fact, and we have to make imaginative links. Sometimes – just sometimes – we come across the evidence that confirms our theory.

So it is in Jurassic Park, which provides Alan Grant with an intellectual and emotional epiphany when he sees for the first time a group of brachiosaurs which confirms his theory about social groups: “They’re moving in herds – they do move in herds!”

Legally Blonde

Sarah Street
Professor of Film, Department of Film and Television Screen Research, University of Bristol, UK

Films about academics tend not to feature the experiences of women, and back in 2001 this was even more so. Legally Blonde (US, Robert Luketic, 2001) is a fresh, comedic spin on the not so dumb blonde trope, set at Harvard Law School as student Elle (Reese Witherspoon) struggles with prejudice in a ferociously competitive Ivy-League, male dominated environment.

Law schools provide good settings for films, since the cases taxing the students for their assignments animate the drama as well as their own personal interrelationships in the mini-world of the university campus. In Legally Blonde Elle uses her specialist female knowledge to confound prejudiced students and professors by rising to the top of her class, ending up as a role model appreciated for her sheer smartness and charm. While Professor Stromwell (Holland Taylor) initially thinks Elle’s unprepared in class, she ends up recognising her brilliance, giving her sage advice as a positive example of a senior female academic.

In its own effervescent way, the film gives us a vicarious insight into US academia with a sassy, third-wave feminist twist.

The Mirror Has Two Faces

David Greven
Professor of English, University of South Carolina, USA

Barbra Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) stars Streisand as an English professor Columbia University, NYC, who schools her eager, fully engaged students in the history of courtly love. Streisand enters into a bargain with a maths professor (Jeff Bridges): a marriage based on intellectual kinship, not physical attraction. This would seem to be a perfect fit for Streisand’s Rose, who lectures her students on spiritual love being a higher, more noble ideal than the carnal kind. But in the end, Rose falls in love with the maths guy and bitterly chafes against his no-sex edict.

This film accords with my thesis about the woman’s film, a venerable classical Hollywood genre in several modern iterations, ranging from horror movies (Carrie, Alien) to romcoms like this one. Streisand’s Rose goes through the physical transformation endemic to the woman’s film, one that allegorises her emotional one. She starts working out and pummels her body into place, eradicating the warm, soft, curly brown-haired, bespectacled appeal she formerly displayed.

In terms of academia, Streisand’s Rose, in her pre-transformation, presumably schlubby persona, nevertheless wields effortless charm in, and command over, a large lecture hall teeming with students who laugh at all of her jokes and appreciatively affirm her literary insights. Wielding a pedagogical mastery to make the angels weep with envy, Rose effortlessly scales the large hall, weaving in and out rows of adoring students, all the while skilfully modelling her intellectual craft and instilling literary-historical insights. She gets a huge burst of applause from her captive charges. One asks, why would anyone want to give this profound engagement up and transform into a vacuous chiseled everywoman?

Look fast for horror wunderkind Eli Roth as an enraptured student-fan.

Sorority Girl 

Dr Barbara J Brickman
Associate Professor of Media and Gender Studies,  Department of Gender and Race Studies, University of Alabama, USA

Campus life has rarely been as vicious and hilariously over-the-top as we find it in Roger Corman’s 1957 gem Sorority Girl.

Coming in at just over an hour, this melodrama-thriller-juvenile-delinquency exploitation mashup leans heavily on Corman favourites Susan Cabot, Dick Miller, and writer Bill Martin, who designed the film’s macabre opening titles, to tell the sordid tale of Cabot’s tortured and torturing sorority bad girl Sabra Tanner. Poisoning the dorm rooms, hangouts, and beaches of her Southern California university milieu, mommy-deprived, sadistic coed Sabra trades in blackmail and sexual brinkmanship to bring her sisters to heel but is also not above a little old-fashioned sapphic discipline at the wrong end of her Chi Sigma paddle.

Expertly produced by low-budget master Corman to meet the enormous demand for youth-oriented fare at the time, Sorority Girl stands out from the crowd with its deliciously campy realisation of femme angst and twisted queer desires – a kind of cinematic rendition of the era’s sensational lesbian pulp fiction, made for the drive-in screen.

Gelecek Uzun Sürer / Future Lasts Forever

Cüneyt Cakirlar
Associate Professor in Film and Visual Culture, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Directed by the Turkey-based director and screenwriter of Hemshin descent, Özcan Alper, docudrama Gelecek Uzun Sürer / Future Lasts Forever (2011) is about an Istanbul-based Armenian researcher, an ethnomusicologist, who collects Anatolian elegies for her thesis. The story focuses on her fieldwork in Diyarbakır, including her conversations or interviews with native Kurdish people, particularly women, who lost their families to murders by unknown assailants.

The film offers a nuanced portrait of an academic while encouraging us to reflect on the ethics of intimacy and distance in cultural research. Navigating love, death, dissent, grief, and cultural memory, personally and professionally, the film’s protagonist invites us to witness her journey, a journey that implicates all academics’ responsibility toward social justice.

It’s My Turn

Justin Wyatt
Associate Professor, Communication Studies and Film/Media, University of Rhode Island, USA

It’s My Turn (1980) features the formidable Jill Clayburgh as Kate Gunzinger, a beleaguered mathematics professor torn between her staid yet comfortable lover (Charles Grodin) and a handsome, has-been baseball player (Michael Douglas). The romantic comedy is much less compelling than the snippets of Dr Gunzinger’s everyday life as a professor. She interviews for a job as chair at another university but is concerned that she will be a token female hire and that her research will come to a standstill.

The film’s highlight – and a scene known all too well by many professors – is when she is challenged in a lecture by an aggressive and overly confident graduate student Cooperman (Daniel Stern). As Dr Gunzinger explains the snake lemma proof, she is continually interrupted, but she maintains composure and, as the bell rings, dryly concludes, “On Monday, we will address ourselves to the cohomology of groups and Mr Cooperman’s next objection.”

It’s My Turn is undoubtedly the best (and maybe only) film of the New Hollywood period featuring an Academy-Award nominated actress offering a very convincing mathematical proof in detail.          

Wicked

Hannah Hamad
Reader in Media and Communication, School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, UK

Warning: this recommendation contains spoilers.

Fellow Ozians. Let us be glad. Let us be grateful. The most thrillifying depiction of life at Shiz University (Upper Land of Oz campus), the hallowed academic institution where the central duo of Wicked’s (JohnM Chu, 2024) double protagonist female friendship narrative, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda (Ariana Grande-Butera), meet as newly enrolled students, is finally upon us. We couldn’t be happier. Couldn’t be luckier. In time though, it becomes apparent (to Elphaba at least) that something very bad is happening at Shiz. Aggressive assaults on the academic freedom of the teaching staff. The anti-intellectual and xenophobic persecution and ostracisation of academics who do not inhabit their bodies, or occupy their place in society, in the way that those in power are demanding of them. Compulsory redundancies (well, kidnappings). And the propagandist usurpation of Shiz’s curricula, but especially that of the class taught by History professor Dr Dillamond (Peter Dinklage), by Emerald City stooges, in service to a political agenda being imposed on the education of students, as the tyrannical government of Oz works in cahoots with corrupt university administration to manipulate their learning.

There is no voluntary severance scheme at Shiz. No means by which Dr Dillamond might apply for Emeritus status. He is forcibly removed from his classroom, and thence from the Shiz campus. The research culture at Shiz is likewise shown to be driven by this nefarious agenda. One that is poised to hone and cultivate Elphaba’s preternatural ability in the elite academic field of Sorcery, but not so that it might be harnessed in service to Ozian society. No. Rather, that it might be exploited to consolidate existing power structures, and to foment growing societal fears of so-called ‘wickedness’.

Elphaba comes to realise the horrendible truth: the explanations being offered up by those she previously trusted for the changes taking place at the university are a crock of Dear Old Shiz. HE in Oz is shrinking. We loathe it all.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions.    _____________________________________________________________________________________________   Main image: Wicked PR