Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Helloturia I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

ElMaruecan82 By chronicling the daily struggles of a French teacher to communicate with his students, "The Class" communicates the inner complexities of the school system not only in France but in any suburban, impoverished area of any Western city, or it's even more universal than that.There is an irony in that psychological arm-wrestling engaged all through the year, the teachers mean good and want to deliver the best, but the students are intelligent enough to question the value of the teaching. Of course, they're not always right, but their way of being wrong can engage in more fruitful discussions than if everybody nodded in unison. It's not about being another brick in the wall, like the song says, but a free spirit behind these walls. And that's the real delight of "The Class", it follows François Marin, played by François Bégaudeau, real-life teacher and author of the original book. He's not a rookie, this is not your typical teacher in a tough class, he knows many students and there seems to be mutual respect despite the usual heckling. But when the bedlam starts, you're suddenly drawn into exchanges where even Marin nods and accepts that these kids have a point, like the uselessness of complicated and sophisticated tenses in real life.The film rises above all the clichés and preconceived notions about the 'suburbs' without sugarcoating them. The melting pot isn't devoid of individual prejudices, against gays, Blacks, Arabs or even white people. By never resorting to self-censorship, "The Class" is a rare opportunity for a real confrontation between the ideals of education and the reality. I've been there too, support at school for fourth and fifth graders, but I've learned very quickly that you can't win them with good intentions. You can't cheat, you must be close enough to earn their respect, not their friendship as it's the perfect ticket for insolence and insubordination, that's the dosage. And over the course of the year, well-meaning and imperfect Marin is confronted to the resistance, verbal, non-verbal or physical from students such as Khoumba, a girl of African background who feels harassed by the teacher, another kid who dares to ask the teacher if he's gay, and perhaps the most memorable student: Esmeralda a tough cookie who calls a spade a spade. There is also a Gothic kid who's not ashamed to display his 'difference', a Chinese teen who works harder than anyone and the gallery never seems forced or cliché, no archetypes but some realities cinema seldom dealt with. While not a documentary, the film is certainly closer to that genre than any fiction but the merit of the director, Laurent Cantet is to have taken non professional kids and made them act so natural, it's one thing to direct a movie like "Avatar" but for "The Class", the directing doesn't get enough credit and works on an Oscar worthy level. If I could find a name to define it, it would be dynamic, in the classroom scenes, it's always like the camera is swinging ping pong style between François and the kids as if it impersonated the way the professor's mind works, like a radar: any voice heard, any intervention deserves to be given its proper attention."Behind the Walls" is the French title and I think it could have been better to keep it like this, because the walls of the class while being generally associated to "entrapment", unleash the best out of these kids and become an area of verbal liberty. Many subplots involve the tough life of these kids outside the class, and indirectly pinpoint the liberating aspect of these walls. The tragedy is that many students don't value it and in one scene, another teacher lets some steam off and can't stand anymore the way they all reject the hand that tries to teach them, he seems to be at the verge of a breakdown and everyone lets him talk. We see him again a few months later, as if nothing happened. Even a teacher needs to "let it go".And this lack of flawlessness is wonderfully conveyed in the case that would lead to the film's climactic 'battle', involving a word the teacher said to qualify the class representatives, provoking a fight in the classroom and disciplinary committee for the troublemaker. It leads to the moment where François is confronted by the students not in the classroom but the schoolyard, and that was a nice twist. Out of his zone of comfort, Marin is almost verbally lynched by the student who want to give him a taste of his own medicine, and while some are sincere, you can tell that for Esmeralda, it's like a poetic justice, to be able to toy with the teacher's emotions and win the verbal contest.I could relate to that because kids can be sneaky, when they know they don't have the upper hand, they use their solidarity and a truncated version of facts. The film starts with a teacher teaching them how to communicate, well at the end he's taught a lesson, if he told girls that during the counsel, they behaved liked bitches, he might as well have called them whores, same effect. The word itself will be used later in a more humorous way, but it shows that language has a weight, a pending gravitas, an equilibrium that can be destroyed at any time. That's how tough it is to teach students.Unanimously winning the Golden Palm in 2008, "The Class" is a real example on how cinema can serve a cause by just being itself, just filming. There's no dramatization, no need of plotting, just a bunch of kids who improvised enough to accentuate the realism, only following guidelines of themes to talk about, and the rest is just one of the realistic documentary-like movies ever made, a real success, a unique film, a school-case of cinema vérité in every sense of the word.

cinemajesty Filmmaking in the wake of documenting a stage play with never-ending dialogue by neglecting the visuals, giving me a stretch of two-hours beyond tiresome.Nevertheless director Laurent Cantent handles a mass of youngsters and his self-fulfilling leading man, French writer/actor François Bégaudeau, well.While watching this unfortunate enough on my laptop instead in a theater, it seems that the film is not given any further exposure of what I have already been known from my own youth at a German high school.Coverage has been handled with a lack of a cinematographic enchantments in an all-too staggering hand-held documentary manner, which on one side gives me the feeling of being part of "The Class". On the other side mainly shot into the actors faces without sharing frequent physical parts as hands and feet of a desperately needed visualization of body languages.My overall feelings on the Palme D'Or Winning Picture from 2008 brings the Cannes festival's jury surrounded by actor Sean Penn, acting as president, in a tight position of just consuming a picture, in an otherwise respectively-speaking weak competition, instead of spiritual digesting it.In further doubt, the 2008 jury chose the most conservative film imaginable, benefiting a picture, which representing realities instead of interpreting, translating it into a proper cinematic vision.Furthermore the fact of being non-stop interior does not benefit "The Class", it makes the film claustrophobic, suffocating and arresting where is not really a need of showing school as a prison than a chance to live, what might have been an extraordinary cinematic experience with participations of Avantgardistic cinematographers such as Anthony Dod Mantle or Bruno Delbonnel.Here at running time marker 1h09mins30sec, the interest for the bulk of introducing characters stand still, even more with being just reduced to spectators of continuous accidents than being in demand to take a stand of controversy on current education in a self-determined so-considered civilized society.At times an Extreme-Close-Up (ECU) of pupils' hands and feet come through the editorial. But mainly Director Laurent Cantent loses himself in talking heads with shying away from essential human conflicts, how one finds his place in life or at least fight for his conviction."The Class" being an adaptation of the leading actor's novel with the same name, François Bégaudeau shares arguably no further insides of a spine, which should question of not challenge the on-going evolution on how education of constantly emerging next generation in the 21st century.So the picture originally title "Entre les murs" - between walls - concludes with a lecture on violent behavior between the educated and the educators, which stands still as anti-civilized action, putting everyone involved and participating in danger. Needless to say that mother and son get chased away, expelled from school.In comparison to an end of the 1968er student generation with the force of institutionalizing confrontations, this picture sees young adults as hopelessly sedated human beings, feelings reduced to love and being loved on pseudo-shifts; and furthermore taught to be part of a society as a single connecting wheel of a gigantic money-ordering clockwork machinery.In 2017, the time when I am reviewing "The Class" declares a whole generation (born between 1981 and 1997) on brakes, close to stagnation with no emotional evolution towards what came before.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

brchthethird THE CLASS (aka ENTRE LES MURS) is a film that is certain to be divisive in some way, whether it be with the borderline slavish devotion to realism or the teacher at the center of the story. While I wouldn't say that I loved it, it was very good on multiple levels. The film follows a teacher (Francois Begaudeau) in a Parisian high school and the class he teaches over the course of a year. Pretty early on, it becomes clear that he has a different approach to teaching than a lot of the other teachers he works with, building a rapport with his students by getting to know them on a personal level. Still, this bunch of inner-city kids aren't the easiest to work with, and have a lot of ups and downs with their teacher. Earlier when I used the word "slavish," I didn't completely mean it in a negative sense. What I really mean is that the film goes to great lengths to accurately portray its subject, the Parisian educational system. I remember bits and pieces from when I was in high school French class, but its an entirely different experience watching what it's probably like on screen. One way in which this film takes a realistic approach is by using (apparently) non-actors/students to portray the class of students. The end credits also indicate that a lot of the teachers used their real first names, probably because they were also teachers in real life. Most importantly, this film is based on the life experiences of the actor portraying the main teacher, M. Marin, who also used to be a teacher himself. Completing this realist approach is the exclusive use of hand-held camera-work and the lack of a score. All of these aspects combine to create the feeling of watching a documentary. Even the dialogue doesn't really feel like dialogue, instead hewing pretty close to how French students probably talk. This cinema verite approach might not work with a lot of people, who might find it boring, but I thought it was compelling enough. The only major issue I have, and this could just be me imposing my cultural experiences onto another, is an event which takes place late into the film. Given that the students in this film are fairly rowdy and occasionally disrespectful, it would make sense that there be some disciplinary action taken. And by and large, the teacher deals with his students in a very progressive way. However, I felt like he crossed the line in one scene where he lets his own students get the better of his emotions, and there isn't any repercussions. For me, this was a large setback to the likability he had established up to that point, and yet after the event boils over it was like nothing had happened at all. Again, it's probably because things work a little differently in France, but it probably wouldn't fly here in the US, especially in the current academic climate. Overall, THE CLASS is still a very valuable and interesting film for the insight it provides into the inner workings of the Parisian school system and the relationship of a teacher with his students. Highly recommended.

sesht Not something I watched recently, but something I referenced quite recently. The audience I watched it at the Angelika when it was on limited release a few years previously was, like most Angelika crowds, very much on board with the paths the movie took, and perfect company to enjoy this kind of flick with.Supposedly based on a true story, this is one of those movies that asks more questions than it answers, where the characters are so real they're almost scary (what will you do when you are in class with a few of them asking the same questions they do in François' class - how does one react when one sees too much o themselves in them - so much reality crammed into one class), and might just about put those people off that come into a movie hall seeking escapist entertainment. Life, smack in the face! As always with movies of this genre, it's timely, topical, and gritty to the point of being extremely uncomfortable.Another thing that sets this one apart from the rest o its ilk - we do Not get to know François (the teacher). It's all about the children in François' class, and their questioning of authority while trying to get a rise from the teacher, who is continuously striving to just do his job - teach. Gradually though, it becomes a game of oneupmanship between each character involved throughout, using their strengths and the others' weakness to play off one another. Think 'Half Nelson' (albeit en Français).