An inspirational drama, Akeelah and the Bee is the story of Akeelah Anderson (Keke Palmer), a precocious eleven-year-old girl from south Los Angeles with a gift for words. Despite the objections of her mother Tanya (Angela Bassett), Akeelah enters various spelling contests, for which she is tutored by the forthright Dr. Larabee (Laurence Fishburne). Akeelah’s aptitude earns her an opportunity to compete for a spot in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and in turn unites her neighborhood who witness the courage and inspiration of one amazing little girl.

During WWII, in a Catholic boarding school in the French countryside, two boys become friends. One is a French boy, Julien Quintin, and the other is a Jewish boy, Jean Bonnet, who is being hidden from the Nazis by the friars who run the school. Louis Malle directed this film based on what actually happened when he was at a boarding school himself during the war.

Using his high school teaching experience as impetus, director Mike Akel made Chalk to encourage school reform through enlightening viewers to the challenges teachers face. This comedic mockumentary capitalizes on four teachers’ frustrations during the course of their school semester, by interviewing them individually as well as placing them together in scenes depicting faculty meetings, school spelling bees, and happy hours at a local bar.

In the hilarious comedy Daddy Day Care, two fathers (Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin) lose their jobs at a large company and are forced to take their sons out of the exclusive Chapman Academy and become stay-at-home fathers. With no job possibilities on the horizon, they open their own day care facility, “Daddy Day Care”, and employ some fairly unconventional and sidesplitting methods of caring for children.

Painfully shy Todd has been sent to the school where his popular older brother was valedictorian. His room-mate, Neil, although exceedingly bright and popular, is very much under the thumb of his overbearing father. The two, along with their other friends, meet Professor Keating, their new English teacher, who tells them of the Dead Poets Society, and encourages them to go against the status quo and are changed for life.

Sam Wood’s Goodbye Mr. Chips is a deeply stirring work starring Robert Donat as the old schoolmaster who looks back upon his life. Told mostly in flashbacks, the film wraps itself around a history of an older England as seen through the generations of boys who pass through Mr. Chips’s classroom. Greer Garson is her usual classy, sexy-intelligent self as Donat’s wife, their earlier courtship one of the film’s highlights.