The Class (2008) Critic Reviews

The movie is bursting with life, energy, fears, frustrations and the quick laughter of a classroom hungry for relief.Read the full review

This unassuming movie will nail you to your seat.Read the full review

Talky in the best sense, the film exhilarates with its lively, authentic classroom banter while its emotional undercurrents build steadily but almost imperceptibly over a swift 129 minutes. One of the most substantive and purely entertaining movies in competition at Cannes this year.Read the full review

The Class is not just the best film released thus far this year. It may be the most gripping.Read the full review

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.Read the full review

The Class is clearly a microcosm of contemporary France, beset by social and economic tensions. More than that, though, it's a saga of education's struggles in many parts of the modern world. If only the film were pure fiction.Read the full review

In a class by itself.Read the full review

The beauty of The Class is that it puts the lie to the one-teacher-can-make-a-difference myth propagated by so many other films.Read the full review

The reality of François' classroom is so intense that it holds our interest even while the film's dramatic focus is building so quietly under the surface that we don't notice it at first.Read the full review