Higher Learning

Good intentions, but dull and predictable.

Higher Learning sells its soul (and its brain) for overwrought melodrama.

Despite some likable performances (Epps is especially winning), the drama in Higher Learning is constricted, hemmed in by Singleton's compulsion to view his characters as walking paradigms of racial and sexual politics.

Higher Learning has a great many things on its mind, which immediately places it in a rather exclusive category of American films these days.

A stylish, intelligent film-maker, Singleton interweaves the threads of his demographic tapestry with assurance, passion and a welcome awareness of the complexities of the college community's contradictory impulses towards integration and separatism.

Everyone here, from beer-swilling white fraternity boys to rap-loving black students harassed by the campus police, can be judged at face value. Everyone is exactly what he or she seems.

Director John Singleton turns his focus to prestigious universities, asking pointed questions about how these institutions perpetuate, or at least turn a blind eye to, important social issues.

I felt like it was lengthy, and they could have chopped down some of this stuff while trying to appeal to everyone...Malik and Remy could have been the movie right there.

What is high...what is learning...yes it's a pretty decent cast, but it's all over the place, and I really wanted it to end.

It was too schematic, too didactic and too cliched to work.