The Teachers' Lounge describes the double moral standard of intolerance and of a political correctness that while questioning it, paradoxically ends up prolonging it. [Full review in Spanish]

| Feb 10, 2025

The sense of atmosphere The Teachers’ Lounge creates makes it absolutely worth a watch.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 7, 2025

Ilker Çatak’s heart-pounding thriller ... puts Leonie Benesch’s kind-hearted soul through the wringer when she steps into a petty theft charge that spirals.

| Jan 2, 2025

The film is impeccably acted and has some suspense built into its plot. Ultimately, though, it’s a frustrating film that may make you grateful if you are no longer involved in the school system.

| Sep 20, 2024

The Teachers’ Lounge brews a storm in a cup of tea.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 9, 2024

The Teachers’ Lounge is a smart school-set political thriller that continuously builds pressure as it dives into its social commentary on the current state of the world, but never at the expense of its own storytelling strengths.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2024

With its well-meaning and even good teachers such as Nowak, The Teachers’ Lounge shows how even the most innocent decision reverberates with impressionable children.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2024

Mistrust is the thematic glue that holds this nail-biter together. What makes the film so spellbinding is the lack of clear cut right and wrong that exists in this conflict.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 19, 2024

The effect is undeniably tense and thrilling, yet one wonders whether the point, which was so splendidly articulated by Jean Vigo in Zéro de conduite, is here stated as soundly and forcefully as it might have been.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 17, 2024

A compelling, moody score and an excellent central performance secures this complex schoolroom drama in which an idealistic teacher comes undone, despite the best of intentions

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 3, 2024

A frog-in-a-kettle study of a societal microcosm under pressure, THE TEACHER’S LOUNGE leaves audiences turning over possible truths and futures for its characters long after the credits roll.

| May 2, 2024

This is a bold film that uses not a child vampire, as in Abigail, in cinemas now, but real children, and the adults charged with their care...

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 29, 2024

Just the right dash of dark humour throughout this allegory of shifting power structures in a school's microcosmic society.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 26, 2024

A quagmire of cross-purposes inside a school is an unsettling lesson in the tenuousness of the structures we build to protect ourselves.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 25, 2024

This is no easy watch – the multiple tensions at work here see to that – but you won’t be forgetting any of it in a hurry.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2024

It's incredibly tense... it almost has a Hitchcockian edge.

| Apr 24, 2024

An ingeniously plotted thriller with a twist, Catak’s film rarely leaves the school building but it has more to say about the world we live in than most of the films I’ve seen this year. Essential viewing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2024

The Teacher’s Lounge doesn’t beat you over the head with political symbolism, instead using humble circumstances to show society’s vulnerabilities. If you don’t mind biting all your nails off, it’s a thrilling experience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2024

Benesch is superb, her face a glazed mask of panic as the shockwaves resulting from her actions shake the very foundations of the school.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 15, 2024

Çatak resists neat answers, and Benesch anchors the film with a performance of contained subtlety.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 12, 2024