The Class is simultaneously old school and new, familiar in its themes but unique in design and, at its best, riveting in execution.
Comment
01/16/09
The Class (2008)
97
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:136
Fresh:132
Rotten:4
Average Rating:8/10
Consensus: Energetic and bright, this hybrid of documentary style and dramatic plotting looks at the present and future of France through the interactions of a teacher and his students in an inner city high school.
Theatrical Release:27-02-2009
Synopsis: Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, master French director Laurent Cantet's THE CLASS is an absorbing journey into a multicultural high school in Paris over the course of a... [More]
Starring: François Begaudeau, Nassim Amrabt, Laura Baquela, Cherif Bounaidja Rachedi
Director: Laurent Cantet
Reviews for The Class
A hybrid that is so naturalistic as to be uber-documentary in its reflection of the observations within.
01/16/09
Cantet uses actual students to retell their own stories, hoping for a gripping authenticity. But what comes across on the screen feels like a sanitized version of real life.
01/14/09
[Cantet's] documentary-like drama is akin to an urban counterpoint to the more idyllic, country school room documented in 2002's "To Be and To Have," injected with some "To Sir, With Love" and a little bit of "Freedom Writers."
01/14/09
[Cantet's] documentary-like drama is akin to an urban counterpoint to the more idyllic, country school room documented in 2002's "To Be and To Have," injected with some "To Sir, With Love" and a little bit of "Freedom Writers."
01/14/09
Extraordinarily vivid and truthful...[an] incredibly honest and revealing film about public education in the age of multiculturalism and globalization.
12/24/08
What initially bears the components of a typical retread of white-teacher-inspires-multi-ethnic-students melodrama turns out to be something much funnier than one might expect from the director of brooding dramas the likes of Time Out and Human Resources.
12/22/08
Bracingly realistic.
12/19/08
The power of The Class will sneak up on you.
12/19/08
Top CriticExhilarating in its simmering, quiet brilliance.
12/19/08
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.
12/19/08
This simple but penetrating film succeeds in being frequently dramatic, often funny and always revelatory.
12/19/08
You walk out of the theater feeling unsettled, curious, and passionate to talk -- as if you just spent two hours in the best class you ever took.
12/18/08
Doesn't lecture, but that doesn't mean its audience won't learn something.
12/18/08
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.
12/18/08
It’s all designed to flatter the middle-class art-film audience’s patronizing attitude toward the Third World.
12/17/08
During the second half’s institutional breakdown, the movie truly comes alive, casting off any To Monsieur, with Love aspirations and turning into something much more complicated, chewy and real.
12/17/08
The Class is a prime document of French post-colonial blues, though its relevance to American urban education could not be any greater if it had been made in the Bronx or Trenton or South Los Angeles.
12/15/08
Though it plays up its own social relevance, it actually works something like an uncomfortably realistic docudrama.
12/11/08
The Class simply exists as it is, a dispatch from a familiar world that has still never seemed to real.
12/06/08
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