Educating RitaMovies like Educating Rita
- Key Features:
- Character study, Personal growth, Teacher-student relationship, Self-discovery, Working class, University, Literature, Alcoholism, Transformation, Coming-of-age
- Tone:
- humorous, earnest, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- Fans of British cinema, Viewers interested in character-driven stories, Those who appreciate witty dialogue, People seeking uplifting narratives
- Emotional Arc:
- Curiosity → Connection → Growth
Educating Rita

Rita, a witty 26-year-old hairdresser, wants to 'discover' herself, so she joins the Open University where she meets the disillusioned professor of literature, Dr. Frank Bryant. His marriage has failed, his new girlfriend is having an affair with his best friend and he can't get through the day without downing a bottle or two of whisky. What Frank needs is a challenge... and along comes Rita.
Educating Rita
A world-weary college professor is given a life-changing diagnosis and decides to throw all pretense and conventions to the wind and live his life as boldly and freely as possible with a biting sense of humor, a reckless streak and a touch of madness.

The life of a melancholy professor is turned upside down when he discovers that a rebellious teenager he is tutoring is actually his son.

Despite her sheltered upbringing, Jenny is a teen with a bright future; she's smart, pretty, and has aspirations of attending Oxford University. When David, a charming but much older suitor, motors into her life in a shiny automobile, Jenny gets a taste of adult life that she won't soon forget.

Rose Morgan, who still lives with her mother, is a professor of Romantic Literature who desperately longs for passion in her life. Gregory Larkin, a mathematics professor, has been burned by passionate relationships and longs for a sexless union based on friendship and respect.

Naive Midwestern prep student Jonathan bonds with his more worldly roommate, Skip, who takes the small-town boy under his wing. At Skip's urging, the inexperienced Jonathan is emboldened to seek out older women in the cocktail lounges of nearby Chicago, where he meets and beds the alluring Ellen, who unfortunately turns out to be Skip's mother. The division between the friends is further deepened when a cheating scandal engulfs the school.

Hapless Henry Palfrey is patronised by his self-important chief clerk at work, ignored by restaurant waiters, conned by shady second-hand car salesmen, and, worst of all, endlessly wrong-footed by unspeakably rotten cad Raymond Delauney who has set his cap at April, new love of Palfrey's life. In desperation Henry enrolls at the College of Lifemanship to learn how to best such bounders and win the girl.

College student Charlie Banks has to face old problems when the bully he had an unpleasant encounter with back in high school shows up on his campus.

Small-town Pennsylvania schoolteacher Linda Sinclair balances her staid home life with an incredible passion for her subject. Then a former star pupil reenters her life after failing as a playwright in New York City. Seeing in his script the inspiration that she has always longed to instill in her students, this dyed-in-the-wool romantic enlists the help of long-suffering drama teacher Carl to mount the work as the high school’s next and riskiest production.

Despite his outstanding intellect, associate professor Charlie Thurber is a chronic underachiever and has never received university tenure. Aided by his nutty best friend, Charlie launches a final effort to make the grade at Gray College. But a beautiful new teacher whose ascending star threatens to eclipse him shakes up Charlie's plans.

A shy but gentle man named Clifford Skridlow is a professor of comparative literature at the financially-strapped fictional Monroe College in Chicago. A chance encounter with four beautiful women at a restaurant changes his life forever.

Rita and Sue are two teenagers living on a run-down council estate in Bradford, who both share a job babysitting for Bob and Michelle's children. Whilst giving them a lift home one night, Bob decides to take Rita and Sue up to a deserted, country-side landscape. Clearly knowing what he has in mind, Rita and Sue are only too happy to oblige and both have a sexual encounter with him that becomes a regular occurrence.

Professor Lipari teaches in a public school and is in a full-on existential crisis. He has no faith in himself and in the possibility of changing the world for the better. At school, a former student of his who is also a teacher will change his attitude.

A headstrong young teacher in a private school in 1930s Edinburgh ignores the curriculum and influences her impressionable 12-year-old charges with her over-romanticized worldview.

When her husband suddenly dumps her, longtime dedicated housewife Deanna turns regret into re-set by going back to college... landing in the same class and school as her daughter, who's not entirely sold on the idea. Plunging headlong into the campus experience, the increasingly outspoken Deanna – now Dee Rock – embraces freedom, fun, and frat boys on her own terms, finding her true self in a senior year no one ever expected.

A snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.

A look at a few chapters in the life of Poppy, a cheery, colorful, North London schoolteacher whose optimism tends to exasperate those around her.

A British Guianese engineer starts a job as a high school teacher in London’s East End, where his uninterested and delinquent pupils are in desperate need of attention and care.

Art professor Nino Rolfe attempts to break down his wife Teresa's conventional modesty. Noticing her affection for their daughter's fiancé, Nino instigates her sexual interest in him - setting off a chain of unexpected events and emotional complications...

Andrew Crocker-Harris is an embittered and disliked teacher of Greek and Latin at a British prep school. After nearly 20 years of service, he is being forced to retire for 'health reasons', and perhaps may not even be given a pension. The boys regard him as a Hitler, with some justification. His unfaithful wife Laura tries to hurt him in any way she can. Andrew must come to terms with his failed life and at least regain his own self-esteem.

Posing as a private tutor, Azra secretly coaches students on achieving their goals in life and love — but not without a few bumps in the road.

William Hundert is a passionate and principled Classics professor who finds his tightly-controlled world shaken and inexorably altered when a new student, Sedgewick Bell, walks into his classroom. What begins as a fierce battle of wills gives way to a close student-teacher relationship, but results in a life lesson for Hundert that will still haunt him a quarter of a century later.

Archie Rice, an old-time British vaudeville performer sinking into final defeat, schemes to stay in show business.

When he suddenly finds himself without his long-standing blue-collar job, Larry Crowne enrolls at his local college to start over. There, he becomes part of an eclectic community of students and develops a crush on his teacher.

A renowned professor is forced to reassess her life when she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.

A nebbish schoolteacher begs his smooth (and misogynistic) pal to teach him 'the knack' – how to score with women. Serendipitously, the men meet up with a new girl in town, as well as a friendly lunatic who can’t help but paint things white.

Pierre is a clumsy, overly serious math teacher at an all-girls high school. His life is thrown into chaos after encountering a beautiful British actress and the paparazzi that follow her around.

A 30-year-old spends a wild weekend in Palm Springs and wakes up to find she has magically transformed into her 70-year-old self.

Slice-of-life look at a sweet working-class couple in London, Shirley and Cyril, his mother, who's aging quickly and becoming forgetful, mum's ghastly upper-middle-class neighbors, and Cyril's pretentious sister and philandering husband. Shirley wants a baby, but Cyril, who reads Marx and wants the world to be perfect, is reluctant. Cyril's mum locks herself out and must ask her snooty neighbors for help. Then Cyril's sister Valerie stages a surprise party for mum's 70th birthday, a disaster from start to finish. Shirley holds things together, and she and Cyril may put aside her Dutch cap after all.

Mame Dennis, a progressive and independent woman of the 1920s, is left to care for her nephew Patrick after his wealthy father dies. Conflict ensues when the executor of the father's estate objects to the aunt's lifestyle and tries to force her to send Patrick to prep school.

In college, Dex was the big man on campus. Ten years later, now an overweight kindergarten teacher, Dex is immune to the shocked stares of the women who were once his conquests. While trying to pick up the bartender, he is struck by the gorgeous Syd. Through a series of circumstances, Syd and Dex are thrown together and he soon finds himself questioning his belief in all things Steve.

London high-society mouse, Roddy is flushed down the toilet by Sid, a common sewer rat. Hang on for a madcap adventure deep in the sewer bowels of Ratropolis, where Roddy meets the resourceful Rita, the rodent-hating Toad and his faithful thugs, Spike and Whitey.

A young man leads a promiscuous lifestyle until several life reversals make him rethink his purposes and goals in life.

Although Mary has little income, she still finds ways to spend her nights at clubs. After being arrested for throwing an illegal rave, she asks her aunt Judy for bail money. Judy then finds Mary a job at her library so that Mary can repay her. Initially, Mary finds the job as a clerk boring and stifling, and prefers to get to know a street food vendor whom she likes. However, Mary must refocus her life once she loses her job and apartment.

New York City English professor Axel Freed outwardly seems like an upstanding citizen. But privately Freed is in the clutches of a severe gambling addiction that threatens to destroy him.

A shy teenage boy trying to escape the influence of his domineering mother, has his world changed when he begins to work for a retired actress.

Daphne is a young woman negotiating the tricky business of modern life. Caught in the daily rush of her restaurant job and a nightlife kaleidoscope of new faces, she is witty, funny, the life of the party. Too busy to realise that deep down she is not happy. When she saves the life of a shopkeeper stabbed in a failed robbery, the impenetrable armour she wears to protect herself begins to crack, and Daphne is forced to confront the inevitability of a much-needed change in her life.

A rugged city editor poses as a journalism student and flirts with the professor.

Phillip Filmore is a naive, 15-year-old, preoccupied with sex, who develops a crush on Nicole Mallow, the new 30-something, French housekeeper and sitter to look after him when Phillip's father is out of town for the summer on a "business" trip. But Mr. Filmore's unscrupulous chauffeur, Lester Lewis, takes advantage of Phillip's crush on Nicole to hire her to seduce the youth, then draws her into a plot to fake her own death in a blackmail scheme aimed to drain Phillip's trust fund.

Literature professor Jim Bennett leads a secret life as a high-stakes gambler. Always a risk-taker, Bennett bets it all when he borrows from a gangster and offers his own life as collateral. Staying one step ahead, he pits his creditor against the operator of an illicit gambling ring while garnering the attention of Frank, a paternalistic loan shark. As his relationship with a student deepens, Bennett must risk everything for a second chance.

A history professor and his wife entertain a young couple who are new to the university's faculty. As the drinks flow, secrets come to light, and the middle-aged couple unload onto their guests the full force of the bitterness, dysfunction, and animosity that defines their marriage.

Andrew Crocker-Harris has been forced from his position as the classics master at an English public school due to poor health. As he winds up his final term, he discovers not only that his wife, Millie, has been unfaithful to him with one of his fellow schoolmasters, but that the school's students and faculty have long disdained him. However, an unexpected act of kindness causes Crocker-Harris to re-evaluate his life's work.

There's a new girl in school, Angela, the Headmaster's neice. Every male will try to seduce her, even her uncle. Meanwhile she will drive the philosophy's teacher mad and her best friend Irma will have a good time with the classmates. Will they get the grades?

A disillusioned college graduate finds himself torn between his older lover and her daughter.

As her marriage dissolves, a Manhattan writer takes driving lessons from a Sikh instructor with marriage troubles of his own. In each other's company they find the courage to get back on the road and the strength to take the wheel.

A rich millionaire hires a sophisticated journalist to bring his somewhat dim-witted girlfriend up to the level of his peers. He fears that the showgirl's lack of etiquette may damage his own social reputation and tries to change her — but fails to realise that her enhanced eloquence will empower her to voice her own strong opinions.

An Irish rogue uses his cunning and wit to work his way up the social classes of 18th century England, transforming himself from the humble Redmond Barry into the noble Barry Lyndon.

Rome, 1989. On his last day of high school, Luca gets in trouble when he takes it all out on hated literature teacher Martinelli, only to discover he's going to be heading the examination board for his finals. During a summer of fruitless study, he falls in love with a girl he met once at a party, unaware that she's Martinelli's daughter. The latter, strangely enough, has just offered Luca to prepare with him...

By day, Richard Haig is a successful and well-respected English professor at renowned Trinity College in Cambridge. By night, Richard indulges his own romantic fantasies with a steady stream of beautiful undergraduates. But Richard has grown tired of the game and is looking for something more meaningful and lasting. So when Kate, Richard’s tanned, athletic, 25-year-old American girlfriend tells him that she is pregnant, Richard is thrilled. He looks forward to having a family of his own, being a father his children could be proud of, not some sex-fueled bobcat. There is only one problem. Richard’s not in love with Kate. Richard is in love with Kate’s sister, Olivia. He had been in love with her ever since he first saw her.

A timid, nearsighted chemistry teacher discovers a magical potion that can transform him into a suave and handsome Romeo. The Jekyll and Hyde game works well enough until the concoction starts to wear off at the most embarrassing times.

The true story of an 84 year-old Kenyan villager and ex Mau Mau freedom fighter who fights for his right to go to school for the first time to get the education he could never afford.

Professor of language and philosophy Dominic Matei is struck by lightning and ages backwards from 70 to 40 in a week, attracting the world and the Nazis. While on the run, the professor meets a young woman who has her own experience with a lightning storm. Not only does Dominic find love again, but her new abilities hold the key to his research.

High school senior Bobby Chrystal fails his French class, which will block him from entering Yale. His rich, authoritarian father hires an attractive 29-year-old to tutor Bobby over the summer and help him pass a make-up exam. While Bobby's friends lead him away into strange excursions aimed at losing their virginity, Bobby finds all the extracurricular activities he needs with his new tutor.

In this coming-of-age comedy, Tim Dunphy is leading a go-nowhere existence, spending his days smoking pot and hanging out with his best friend, Drugs Delaney. But Tim's lazy days of getting high are jettisoned after a brush with the law convinces his blue-collar dad to send him to a Connecticut prep school. The one saving grace of the new school is Jane, a fellow student Tim falls for immediately.

Giada is a overachieving student who works to pay for college. Riccardo is a spoiled brat who answers her tutoring ad in order to improve his abysmal grades. She's shy and homely. He's handsome and brazen. As they say, opposites attract.

Because of his wavering health, Monsieur Henri can no longer live alone in his Paris appartment. Particularly grumpy, he ends up nonetheless accepting his son Paul's suggestion that he let one of his rooms out to a young female student. Far from falling for her charms, Henri uses her to orchestrate utter family chaos...

During the 1970s a student named Gilles gets entangled in contemporary political turmoils although he would rather just be a creative artist. While torn between his solidarity to his friends and his personal ambitions he falls in love with Christine.

In college, attorney Molly Singer was the life of every party. Now, she's about to be fired because she can't leave her partying ways behind. Molly's boss, Brenda, tells Molly there's one way to save her job: re-enroll at her old alma mater, befriend Brenda's socially awkward son, Elliot, and take him from zero to campus hero.

A day in the life of a barbershop on the south side of Chicago. Calvin, who inherited the struggling business from his deceased father, views the shop as nothing but a burden and waste of his time. After selling the shop to a local loan shark, Calvin slowly begins to see his father's vision and legacy and struggles with the notion that he just sold it out.

A disillusioned, angry university graduate comes to terms with his grudge against middle-class life and values.

An art instructor and an English teacher form a rivalry that ends up with a competition at their school in which students decide whether words or pictures are more important.

Two first-year students at Oxford University join a secret society and learn that their reputations can be made or destroyed over the course of one evening.

After thirty years teaching in London, Mark Thackeray retires and returns to Chicago. There, however, the challenge of teaching kids in an inner city school proves to be too much to resist.

Monsieur Bosquier, the owner of a private school, is far from pleased when his eldest son, Philippe, fails his end of year exams. He decides to send his wayward offspring to England to improve his English. In exchange, Philippe’s host, a wealthy whisky distiller, Mac Farrel, will send his daughter, Shirley, to live with the Bosquiers in France. However, Philippe has already decided to spend the summer holidays on a yacht with his friends, so he sends a fellow student, Michonnet, to England in his place. The deception is soon discovered but things go from bad to worse when Philippe and Shirley fall in love and fly to Scotland to get married...

An ambitious teaching student's finals studies are interrupted by a passionate affair with a jazz musician.

A rebellious young woman with cerebral palsy leaves India to study in New York. On her journey of self-discovery, she unexpectedly falls in love.

Paulette Van Der Beck and her husband have been running the housekeeping school of Bitche in Alsace for many years. Their mission is to train teenage girls to become the perfect housewives at a time when women were expected to be subservient to their husband. After the sudden death of her husband, Paulette discovers that the school is on the verge of bankruptcy and has to take her responsibilities. But while preparations are underway for the best housekeeping competition TV show, she and her lively students start questioning their beliefs as the nation-wide protests of May 1968 transform society around them. Reunited with her first love, André, and with the help of her eccentric stepsister Gilberte and strict nun Marie-Therese, Paulette joins forces with the schoolgirls to overcome their suppressed status and become liberated women.

A Beverly Hills hairdresser runs around town on the eve of the 1968 presidential election trying to make heads or tails of his financial and romantic entanglements. His attempts to gather the money to open his own salon are continually side-tracked by the distractions presented by his many lovers.

A middle-aged woman leaves her partner and drifts back to her ex-husband, while the lives of her middle class friends intersect with her own.

Nancy Stokes, a retired schoolteacher, is pretty sure she has never had good sex. Now that her husband has died, she is determined to take a tour of sexual vistas that until now she has only imagined. She even has a plan; it involves an anonymous hotel room, and a sex worker who calls himself Leo Grande.

After retiring to the beautiful Mexican town of Guanajuato, a 70 year old decides to follow his dreams and enroll at the university where he stumbles upon a new generation and they are bound together by the novel Don Quijote de la Mancha.

Teacher in the most prestigious highschool in the country, François enjoys the life he’s always known, in the intellectual and bourgeois society of Paris. Trapped in a situation where he’s forced to accept a job in a school of a tough underprivileged suburb, he finds himself confronted to his own limits and to the upheaval of his values and certainties.

Despite his dedication to the junior-high students who fill his classroom, idealistic teacher Dan Dunne leads a secret life of addiction that the majority of his students will never know. But things change when a troubled student Drey makes a startling discovery of his secret life, causing a tenuous bond between the two that could either end disastrously or provide a catalyst of hope.

Rachel is a 35-year-old school teacher who has no man in her life and lives with her mother. When a man from the big city returns and asks her out, she begins to have to make decisions about her life and where she wants it to go.

At Phoenix Progressive School, students take notes lying on parlor couches and are encouraged to explore their gifts through electives like break-dancing and graphic-novel writing. In the midst of all this liberal pedagogy and budding talent, Molly Maxwell feels unexceptional, until she falls for her attractive English teacher, Ben.

Terri, a pajama-clad, disaffected high school student learns how to engage the world with the help of Mr. Fitzgerald, his assistant principal.

A young MBA mistakenly interviews for the wrong job... and ends up as an Au Pair for a pair of snotty rich kids.

The future of Marguerite, a brilliant student in Mathematics at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, seems all planned out. The only woman from her year, Marguerite is finishing a thesis she has to present to an audience of researchers. On the big day, a mistake shakes all her certainties and all her foundations collapse.

When a well-loved headmaster decides to retire, his scheming pupils have other ideas. The cunning boys unleash a campaign of practical jokes, armed with gin, itching power, and bombs!

A shy but ambitious film student falls into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man.

A touching story of two completely different students from two completely different worlds. One is a rich male repeating his third year of high school and the other a poor girl in her second year of university struggling to make ends meet.

After inheriting a large country estate from his late father, Peter invites his friends from college: married couple Roger and Mary, the lonely Maggie, fashionable Sarah, and writer Andrew, who brings his American TV star wife, Carol. Sarah's new boyfriend, Brian, also attends. It has been 10 years since college, and they find their lives are very different.

Czech literature teacher Josef Tkaloun, who is past retirement age, realises one day that he no longer understands his pupils, and so he quits… dramatically. What he does not predict is that in doing this he will lose his sense of place in society.

Over one intense day, the devoted head teacher of a last-chance reform school strives to keep his students in line while facing pressures of his own.

Handsome but backward gardener Tim Melville has a new woman in his life. She is Mary, his widowed employer, a woman who had given up on love until she had found Tim. At first they are friends. But soon they become lovers, as Mary, drawn to Tim's innocence and magnetism, begins to teach him all about life - and love.

A short, unhappy affair with a married man leads a dedicated schoolteacher into the alcohol-and-drug fueled underworld of singles’ bars, where she begins to engage in a pattern of dangerous sexual activity.

Mario Moreno portrays a professor in this movie. A small town in the middle of no where requests the school Mario Moreno is working in for a teacher. He ends up going to give the town a hand. When he arrives he comes to know the corrupt leaders who through out the movie try to make him leave. Although he is being harassed you can see how much he cares for the kids and their circumstances. He deals with problems by using his hilarious comments.

In a high school in the outskirts of Rome, it's the last day before the summer holidays. A literature teacher reminisces the past year and wonders what will become of the students he cared for as if they were his children.

Mr Wickers and his class go on one final school trip after they finish their GCSEs.

Andy moves to New York to work in the fashion industry. Her boss is extremely demanding, cruel and won't let her succeed if she doesn't fit into the high class elegant look of their magazine.

Maria is a cleaning lady, who is reserved, shy and clumsy. When she is assigned to the School of Fine Arts, she meets Hubert, the school's whimsical guardian. There she discovers a fascinating place where freedom, creativity and daring reign.

A teacher discovers his calling. Marco relocates to Palermo from Milan and takes a job teaching in a reform school while he waits for a high school position. He tries to understand and motivate his handful of students, reading them colloquial poetry, encouraging them to stand up for their rights, finding out about their histories. Natale, in for murder, enamoured of the Mafia, the King Rat within the group; Mery, a drag queen, arrested for assault when defending himself, in love with Mario and, in daylight, rejected by all; Pietro, illiterate, muscular, believing his destiny is set; the callow Claudio, vulnerable, learning to harden himself. What can Mario learn and do in such a short time?

Pansy is a woman so full of rage that every interaction she has devolves into lashing out, whether at her utterly cowed husband and son, or random strangers who have the temerity to address her. In contrast, her younger sister Chantelle lives with her two vivacious daughters and plies a successful trade as a hairdresser, putting clients at their ease all day long. Yet beneath Pansy’s abrasive exterior are hints of a more fragile psyche, one motivated by fear and damaged by repressed pain.

The annual British Hairdressing Championship comes to Keighley, a town where Phil and son Brian run a barbershop and Phil's ex-wife Shelly and her lover Sandra run a beauty salon.

Though young Jane Austen's financially strapped parents expect her to marry the nephew of wealthy Lady Gresham, Jane herself knows that such a union will destroy her creativity and sense of self-worth. Instead, she becomes involved with Tom Lefroy, a charming but penniless apprentice lawyer who gives her the knowledge of the heart she needs for her future career as a novelist.

At a prestigious all-male university, three friends seek love outside of the school grounds; at the same time, a newly-hired music teacher seeks to befriend and loosen up the militantly strict headmaster.

Sonia breaks the perhaps most exciting time of her life, because the 20-year-old moves to Berlin for a mathematics study. Once there, she soon began to build up a new circle of friends, and then she fell in love with the kind, but irresponsible Ladja. There is only one big catch: the dear money is a bit scarce and therefore Sonia one day, financially, but also from curiosity, the path to prostitution. From now on, it leads a brisk double flight, which can fly at any time. Her experiences are ambivalent, as part-time she often gets into difficult situations, but also gets to know nice people, while she enjoys life just as a student. But how long can it maintain the double game?

Kenneth (who likes to call himself Kay) begins to realise he's just another wannabe bad boy... even less than a loser in fact. After quitting his job at Laimsbury's, Kay vows to become a respected gangster... or cry trying. A pulls-no-punches, coming-of-age story, centering on one directionless hopeless "shotter", who finds his true worth in the face of urban adversity.

Joe Gardner is a middle school teacher with a love for jazz music. After a successful audition at the Half Note Club, he suddenly gets into an accident that separates his soul from his body and is transported to the You Seminar, a center in which souls develop and gain passions before being transported to a newborn child. Joe must enlist help from the other souls-in-training, like 22, a soul who has spent eons in the You Seminar, in order to get back to Earth.

Paul Dedalus is at a crossroads in his life. He has to make several decisions; should he complete his doctorate, does he want to become a full professor, does he really love his long-standing girlfriend, or should he re-start with one of his other lovers?
