A 15-year-old hooligan is hot for teacher in Notes, and Cate Blanchett's Sheba Hart returns the ardor. The schoolroom sex scenes are hyper and biological, and Blanchett avoids playing the dumb strumpet that the Today show spotlights whenever a real-life teacher gets extracurricular with a student. Yes, director Richard Eyre (Iris, Stage Beauty) benefits from that same queasy titillation of pedagogy turning into pedophilia, but Blanchett makes Sheba compellingly wounded, desperate for a release from domestic difficulties—her son is mentally disabled; her husband (Bill Nighy) is a generation older—and in need of the same nurturing that she offers in her job and her household. Her bad behavior drops her into a spinster's web, but the tut-tutting protector in the teacher's lounge (Judi Dench) has neglected de-sires of her own. The scandal unites and then divides the two women, and even in full meltdown Blanchett electrifies.