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Excellent film. The french title, Entre les Murs (Between the Walls), is more in the spirit of the film. It is the interactions and relationships of a teacher and his 14 and 15 year old students in the span of a nine month school term. The school...
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Excellent film. The french title, Entre les Murs (Between the Walls), is more in the spirit of the film. It is the interactions and relationships of a teacher and his 14 and 15 year old students in the span of a nine month school term. The school is in Paris. The class is for students who's first language is not french.

The Class won the 2008 Cannes Film Festival's highest award, the Palme d'Or.

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Posted mar 19, 2009 10:17 am pt

• [+] Variety
  
  100
  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.

  by Justin Chang | Read Full Review »
• [+] Time
  
  100
  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.

  by Richard Schickel | Read Full Review »
• [+] Slate
  
  100
  This unassuming movie will nail you to your seat.

  by Dana Stevens | Read Full Review »
• [+] Entertainment Weekly
  
  100
  In a class by itself.

  by Lisa Schwarzbaum | Read Full Review »
• [+] New York Magazine
  
  100
  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.

  by David Edelstein | Read Full Review »
• [+] Wall Street Journal
  
  100
  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.

  by Joe Morgenstern | Read Full Review »
• [+] Christian Science Monitor
  
  100
  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.

  by Peter Rainer | Read Full Review »
• [+] Chicago Sun-Times
  
  100
  The movie is bursting with life, energy, fears, frustrations and the quick laughter of a classroom hungry for relief.

  by Roger Ebert | Read Full Review »
• [+] Chicago Tribune
  
  100
  This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.

  by Michael Phillips | Read Full Review »
• [+] Boston Globe
  
  100
  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.

  by Wesley Morris | Read Full Review »
• [+] The New Yorker
  
  100
  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.

  by David Denby | Read Full Review »
• [+] Washington Post
  
  100
  The Class is not just the best film released thus far this year. It may be the most gripping.

  by John Anderson | Read Full Review »
• [+] Seattle Post-Intelligencer
  
  100
  The young cast, all nonactors who developed their characters with Cantet and Bégaudeau, brings the weight of full lives to each of the students.

  by Sean Axmaker | Read Full Review »
• [+] Baltimore Sun
  
  100
  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.

  by Michael Sragow | Read Full Review »
• [+] The Onion (A.V. Club)
  
  91
  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.

  by Scott Tobias | Read Full Review »