The New York Times

It’s a measure of this film’s stealthy brilliance that it blurs the line between empathy and exploitation.

Screen Daily by Dan Fainaru

The Workshop conveys a stunningly authentic portrait of French youth today; their class, racial and occupational concerns.

Variety by Guy Lodge

A sly, supple and repeatedly surprising collision of literary, moral and political lines of debate that marks an enthralling return to form for writer-director Laurent Cantet.

Screen International by Dan Fainaru

The Workshop conveys a stunningly authentic portrait of French youth today; their class, racial and occupational concerns.

The New York Times by Jennifer Szalai

It’s a measure of this film’s stealthy brilliance that it blurs the line between empathy and exploitation.

Washington Post by Alan Zilberman

It is not exactly a thriller, yet its plausibility will inspire very real anxiety.

The Guardian

It’s a film which demonstrates that debate, the exchange of ideas, can be as thrilling as any ramped up action flick.

The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer

Featuring sharp performances from Marina Fois (Polisse) and promising newcomer Matthieu Lucci, the film shows Cantet returning to form...with a story that pursues the themes of his best work while underscoring some of the issues currently facing his homeland.

The Guardian by Wendy Ide

It’s a film which demonstrates that debate, the exchange of ideas, can be as thrilling as any ramped up action flick.

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

The trappings are thriller-ish, but the playing field is recognizably timely: a fast-changing economic/cultural world in which some youth are up for the challenge to reconcile a vanished past with a roiling present — France's terrorism woes are explicitly referenced — while others are dangerously indifferent to it.

The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide

A third act that stumbles into genre territory loses focus temporarily, but is redeemed by a scene that celebrates the power of words above all else.

RogerEbert.com by Godfrey Cheshire

For myself, I couldn’t avoid the irony that, in finding it ultimately rather superficial and self-satisfied in that particular Parisian way, I was echoing Antoine’s criticism of Olivia’s writing.

TheWrap by Ben Croll

Though the film occasionally assumes the airs of a slow-burning thriller, the overall product remains a firmly intellectual exercise.

Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray

Matthieu Lucci deftly carries the weight of all the symptoms that The Workshop loads upon Antoine, a resonant character whose inscrutability is at once dangerous, sympathetic, and eerily apt.

Village Voice

These scenes of debate (reminiscent of Cantet’s The Class from 2008) thrum with energy, thanks to the spontaneous and full-bodied performances of the nonprofessional cast, whose improvised dialogue feels casual, yet cuttingly profound.

The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo

Cantet remains a gifted filmmaker — The Workshop’s semi-improvisational aspects are no less impressive than those in "The Class," and he’s at least superficially engaged with the current state of the world — but this isn’t the return to form that his fans have awaited over the past decade.