The Emperor's Club (2002)
Directed by Michael Hoffman
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.
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What critics compared The Emperor's Club to
With a style not unlike the 1989 Robin Williams vehicle Dead Poets Society, it tells the story of a man so passionate about his subject (in this case, ancient Greek and Roman culture) that his students, for the most part, become caught up in it as well; however, in this story one comes along whose attitude clashes so badly with the teachers, it begins to disrupt his entire well-ordered universe.
But, the insipid, shallow tale of "The Emperor's Club", based on the short story by Ethan Canin (The Palace Thief), has pretensions of being a combination of "Goodbye Mister Chips" (the so-so 1969 one, not he the 1938 Robert Donat version) and "Dead Poets Society," but the makers can't even come up with a less derivative title.