When Paul Schrader’s new moral drama The Basics of Philosophy begins, we are on a fictional college campus where John (Jack Huston), a professor of philosophy, gives an introductory lecture about the meaning of his course. Soon after, we see him in his office with a female student, who is begging for a grade change. She makes a clumsy attempt at seduction that he rebuffs, but the charged moment lingers in the air for several scenes afterward. I braced myself, concerned that we might be in store for a version of After the Hunt from a male perspective, or an attempt to yoke the older attitudes of, say, David Mamet’s Oleanna to the more…
