[If … is a] film of considerable distinction though missed excellence…. If … is much more effective while it chronicles the faintly surreal realities of English public-school life than when it enters the domain of the surreal whole hog. The story of three musketeers of nonconformity in a tradition-sodden English school functions admirably on the level of smug authoritarianism crossed by petty defiance; but the final holocaust would have required both more imaginative writing and, in the director, the unlikely combination of a Jean Vigo and a Luis Buñuel. (p. 109)

The infiltration of the surreal is not uncleverly managed…. [Strange] strands crop up in the fabric of things, but they are not shown as one person's vision, rather as a world slowly turning psychotic.

This may sound defensible, even challenging, on paper; on the screen, it comes out untidy, indeed pretentious…. As in This Sporting Life, one gets a...