This is not an 'inspirational teacher' movie, but it is a small, quiet inspiration.

| Aug 29, 2018

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

But ultimately it's a fascinating, sometimes exhilarating movie that seems to make a genuine contact with the classroom, and shows us an educational system struggling, and managing, to survive.

| Aug 23, 2009

Cantet's film lulls the spectator into the rhythms of the everyday reality of school, belying a very carefully coordinated narrative structure that only becomes apparent in its final act.

| Aug 8, 2009

Most impressive, Cantet tracks the racial and ethnic resentments that simmer beneath the classroom discussions but become harder to quell when the parents get involved.

| Mar 13, 2009

The film raises important questions about learning, authority and discipline, and is honest enough to admit that it doesn't really have any answers.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2009

The kinetic and perceptive realism of The Class puts to shame the entire field of schoolroom dramas and makes the movie seem more like an acutely observed Frederick Wiseman documentary than any up-the-down-staircase melodrama

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 5, 2009

The fact that it's based on a book written by a former teacher who also stars in the film gives it more than a bit of authenticity

| Original Score: A | Feb 27, 2009

These kids aren't always all right. But they are consistently riveting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 27, 2009

In addition to being one of the best school films of recent times, this is a troubling but gripping exposé of the cultural and racial divisions crippling Europe. Intelligent, well acted and deeply discomfiting.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2009

A sparkling, clever work whose ensemble cast impresses, surprises, wrongfoots and disappoints you in exactly the same fashion a class might its teacher.

| Original Score: 5/6 | Feb 27, 2009

French director Laurent Cantet does something miraculous with it in this fresh piece of humanist, realist, optimist cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 27, 2009

The Class confirms and extends Cantet's status as one of the masters of European social cinema. It's a hugely important film.

| Feb 27, 2009

This is a fleeting glimpse into a rarely examined world. Despite its honest portrayal of teachers as overworked, underpaid and underappreciated, you even leave the cinema wanting to teach.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2009

How could anyone not love Laurent Cantet's The Class (Entre les murs)? Last year's Golden Palm winner is the best film about schoolteaching I have seen: a wise, funny cry of helplessness before the tsunami of anarchy that can be school-age adolescence.

| Feb 27, 2009

Cantet has offered another subtly incisive study of work, class and family.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2009

What emerges is a high-school movie that is remarkably enthralling and complex. A quietly outstanding microcosm of modern society that's anything but ABC.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 27, 2009

To say this is an important film would perhaps be offputting - but it is, and please don't be offput.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 27, 2009

By rough estimate, maybe 80 percent of the movie consists of these student-teacher slanging matches, but it's engrossing.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 20, 2009

Never feels scripted, even with so much talking.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 20, 2009