Humbert Humbert, the debonair lovesick scoundrel who narrates Nabokov’s “Lolita,” tries mightily to convince us of his essential sanity. And Barbara Covett, the predatory aging schoolteacher who narrates Zoë Heller’s novel “What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal” (2003), wants us to believe that she’s a generous and good friend. They’re initially so plausible, these monsters of calculation! They try to fool us the same way they fool the world. Part of the fun of reading such books is slowly discovering the truth of events that the narrators describe with self-serving relish. But, if you’re a filmmaker, how do you transfer the point of view of a character like Humbert or Barbara to a movie? A few lines of voice-over narration don’t really do the trick, and the occasional use of the camera as a first-person device, as in Robert Montgomery’s “Lady in the Lake,” in which the camera takes the hero’s point of view throughout—and even gets sucker-punched and blacks out—seems more silly than expressive.

Stanley Kubrick found one solution, with “Lolita.” Now the playwright-screenwriter Patrick Marber and the director Richard Eyre have adapted Heller’s novel into a wonderfully entertaining movie, “Notes on a Scandal.” We see Barbara (Judi Dench) and all the other characters in the usual way, from outside, but we also hear long excerpts from Barbara’s gleeful diary as she wreaks havoc on the world. Barbara teaches at an ordinary “comprehensive school” in North London, a place, as she describes it, of habitual underachievement, in which knobby-kneed boys and bland-looking girls stumble their way into the unchanging British lower middle class. Disappointed in her own life, Barbara refuses to entertain any hopes for her students. She’s an envious and miserable woman, and a touch mad, but, even as we long for her to be thwarted, we laugh at her acid take on life. Marber and Eyre have honored both the actual world—we can see it for ourselves—and Barbara’s malicious and jaundiced view.