Slate

This unassuming movie will nail you to your seat.

Time by 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.

Variety by 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.

The New Yorker by 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.

Slate by Dana Stevens

This unassuming movie will nail you to your seat.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

In a class by itself.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by 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.

Wall Street Journal by 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.

Christian Science Monitor by 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.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

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

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.

The A.V. Club by 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.

The New York Times by 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.

Los Angeles Times by 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.

Village Voice

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.

Salon by 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.

New York Post by Lou Lumenick

The Class offers no Hollywood ending, but is rewarding for those up to the challenge.