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Class, The
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics
Universal acclaim
Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 48 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Robin Campillo
Laurent Cantet
Directed by: Laurent Cantet
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 19, 2008
DVD: August 11, 2009
Running Time: 128 minutes, Color
Origin: France
Language(s): French
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for language
Starring François Bégaudeau
François and his fellow teachers prepare for a new year at a high school in a tough neighborhood. Armed with the best intentions, they brace themselves to not let discouragement stop them from trying to give the best education to their students. Cultures and attitudes often clash in the classroom, a microcosm of contemporary France. As amusing and inspiring as the teenaged students can be, their difficult behavior can still jeopardize any teacher's enthusiasm for the low-paying job. François insists on an atmosphere of respect and diligence. Neither stuffy nor severe, his extravagant frankness often takes the students by surprise. But his classroom ethics are put to the test when his students begin to challenge his methods. (Sony Classics)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Variety Justin Chang
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 Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
It is hard to think of another film more tightly autobiographical than this one. It's even harder to think of other films that build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and disparate incidents.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Cantet's real-time classroom scenes are revelations: They make you understand that teaching is moment to moment, an endless series of negotiations that hang on intangibles—on imagination and empathy and the struggle to stay centered. This is a remarkable movie.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
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 Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Wherever you were schooled, in public schools or private, in the slums or in the suburbs, you will recognize yourself in this film and laugh and beam and cower.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The movie is bursting with life, energy, fears, frustrations and the quick laughter of a classroom hungry for relief.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
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 Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
I would be surprised if this brilliant and touching film didn't become required viewing for teachers all over the United States. Everyone else should see it as well--it's a wonderful movie.
Read Full Review >Washington Post John Anderson
The Class is not just the best film released thus far this year. It may be the most gripping.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
The young cast, all nonactors who developed their characters with Cantet and Bégaudeau, brings the weight of full lives to each of the students.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
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 Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
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 Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Here Mr. Cantet -- whose earlier features include "Human Resources" and "Time Out," two other dramas about systems of power -- has done that rarest of things in movies about children: He has allowed them to talk.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The Class is a lovely, exhilarating work about the ways in which failure and frustration can open the pathways through which we make sense out of life.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ella Taylor
For anyone who loves language, this cut-and-thrust is a heady delight, so rich and free-flowing in its rhythms that it's hard to decide whether what we're seeing is a vérité-style documentary or a realist drama.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
The keen observations of The Class ultimately become a remedial education in themselves.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Considering the strength of performances given by the 25-or-so teenage actors portraying the students, it's amazing that none of them have previous experience.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
French movies are not so neatly resolved. In fact, the point of many French movies, such as this provocative one from director Laurent Cantet, is that some problems don't have satisfying solutions - or resolutions.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The Class is a deeply moving film about the challenges of educating children in a complex and often turbulent world.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Fierce, funny and moving, The Class graduates with honors. It's unmissable.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
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.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Connie Ogle
Skillfully straddles an intriguing line between reality and fiction.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
This is the most realistic film about teaching that you're ever likely to see.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
The Class offers no Hollywood ending, but is rewarding for those up to the challenge.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
The Class is simultaneously old school and new, familiar in its themes but unique in design and, at its best, riveting in execution.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Matthew Sorrento
The Class is a one-trick show: once you spot its approach, the narrative falls into a routine. To the "nsiders," the film is as familiar as an an aerial virtual reality ride would be to an airplane pilot. (This is hardly a surprise, since Bégaudeau was himself once an insider, though now safe in a film critic's chair.)
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 48 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
trash can gave it an8:
Unique, different, and something you haven't seen before? Yes. A great must see movie? No.
nick j gave it an8:
If I could, I would actually give this an 8 1/2. It was an extremely subtle and well thought out portrait of the less seen in France. Francois Begaudeau was extremely good as himself in this extremely good film.
richard j gave it a2:
Well, this film has had very high critical ratings. I must be missing something as I thought this film was tedious, very long in length and no character development at all and poorly acted. The joke is I have just trained as a teacher and this class on screen were the most docile pupils I would have ever taught and most of them were very unintelligent, try teaching in South London in the UK or schools in the US within rough areas, when you have to break up knife fights, issues with anger management, ADD and other issues. With that in mind, this film makes The Class seem very weak, Souleyman would never have been expelled in most schools for what he did as it was a minor incident and the new boy was perfectic. If this was an English speaking film, it would be laughed at and criticised for being tame. Don't believe the hype, and don't watch as you will be wasting two to three hours of your life.
Harold T gave it a6:
Been there, done that. Ever hear of the Blackboard Jungle, or more to the point for this movie, To Sir, With Love? Bonding over soccer, the game that both the colonizer and the colonies love, as a coda? Please. If this movie were in English it would be laughed out of town, but almost anything in French has its appeal. A six for charming characters and actors and the Frenchness of it all.
John gave it a7:
Lots of Pros and Cons. The authenticity is great. But as someone who observes teachers all day, what struck me was that he was not really a very good teacher. There are teacher who would have created a much more positive and productive climate. Lecture and discussion is a really limited instructional approach. I observe in the most challenging schools in LA and I see teachers that have 0 problems with students and others who seem to be living in a war zone with the same students. This school in France is really typical, in that it is not that great. The solutions and the cleverness do not include any really good ideas or lead to any real answers. The acting in the movie is amazing. The kids were remarkable. But this is not a slice of life movie, it is slice of life in the class of a teacher who is creating his own struggles, dramas and perpetual difficulties. The movie about the teacher who got this same group of kids to work in teams and invest in meaningful work and refrained from all the negativity, would never be made it would be too uneventful and would seem unrealistic. But I was in a class today that was in inner city LA, with much lower income students and all the students were happy, on task and positive. This movie is to teaching what "Revolutionary Road" is to relationships. A good relationship or a good class is just not that interesting, but it is possible and it is much more fun to be involved in.
Ryan S gave it a2:
Boring, monotonous drivel. Felt like I was back in grade school, listening to all the bickering going on around me. This movie really is pointless. It just goes on and on.
Peter G gave it a10:
It's hard for me to imagine a story so heavily anchored in the mundane that kept me so heavily anchored to my seat. I've watched this film about 4 times so far, and have yet to grow bored of it. The teacher, who has a predetermined curriculum to impart, is constantly being derailed by the dialectic that these students seem to prefer much more. In so doing, they seem to arrive at a middle ground between what society has determined is important for these kids to learn, and what actually IS relevant to them in their lives and experiences, not unlike a dialogue between interlocuters and Socrates, to whom they later even pay tribute with a mention of Plato's 'Republic'. Along the way, you observe the blindness and shortcomings of institutions as well as the obstinant perpetuance of the disenfranchised. Somewhere between the need for social harmony and the need for change, between the theoretical and the practical, and between aspirations and reality, you are educated at the crossroads through which all these intersect "between the walls" of 'The Class'.
