From the start, wide differences are apparent in the class over standards of dress, deportment, knowledge, and application. In stark contrast to films like Dead Poets Society or Mr Holland's Opus, where the characters' private lives and extra-curricular activities drive the drama, The Class shows us Mr Marin trying to explain the intricacies of grammar to his students, and lets the film's themes arise from these discussions. The film has received critical acclaim, achieving a 95% rating at Rotten Tomatoes out of 161 reviews counted, and an average rating of 8.

She is responsible for processing the ID, Qualifications, DBS Check and References for all our newly joining tutors , as well as taking tuition enquiries, matching tutors to clients, and supporting tutors and clients throughout the process of tuition. The Class is an honest, heartfelt and consistently entertaining portrayal that maintains a level of realism that will keep its viewers constantly reminding themselves that they're not watching a documentary -- it's difficult to think of much higher praise to heap on the film than that. It features standout performances from the young actors - real pupils who made the movie in their holidays. François has a lesson in which he simply demonstrates at some length the imperfect subjunctive tense. The trickiest member of the class is Souleymane (Franck Keita), a boy from Mali with family problems and a temper.

The film, with its limited budget, its cast of unknowns and its delicate handling of challenging themes, was not expected to be a major success. The film is the result of numerous improvisation exercises with a mix of real students and young actors; many of the characters' first names are the actors' first names. Yet French director Laurent Cantet does something miraculous with it in this fresh piece of humanist, realist, optimist cinema, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year and was surely very unlucky not to get an Academy award.

Between the walls') is a 2008 French drama film directed by Laurent Cantet, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by François Bégaudeau. François is a caring and passionate teacher, but we see him struggling to maintain his authority and to keep the group of 25 teenagers he teaches every day interested in French language and literature . At the time the French President Nicolas Sarkozy sparked accusations of racism by condemning the largely immigrant rioters as "scum". Education is a dialogue between equals, in which the professor is obligated to lower himself to the intellectual level of his students, "lower" not in the sense of superiority, but of capacity and experience. Rabah Nait Oufella, one of the French students from the film The Class, which won a Palme d'Or at Cannes film festival last year.Francois Begaudeau's memoir/novel about teaching in inner city Paris provides the basis for The Class, which inventively combines the best of the documentary and classic drama genres.

For the majority of its running time, the drama in this movie occurs within the four walls of a single classroom, as Mr Marin tries to teach the feisty, combative and lively teenagers in his charge. I think it must be difficult to teach me because I like to wind people up, but I'm a lot calmer now since the film. And in a way, François does learn something: he learns that, however vaguely he intended to use the word, for his working-class teenage pupils, "skank" means "prostitute". And though by the end of the film, we're left wondering how education is even possible, there is a measure of hope in the realization that the system of pedagogy is generally sound, that students are generally well-meaning and capable, and that somehow many people emerge from the morass of adolescence and structured schooling as predominantly well-adjusted individuals. It is a film to be mentally positioned somewhere between Nicolas Philibert's Être et Avoir, about a rural infant school, and Cantet's own workplace drama, Human Resources.Neither side gives ground, and yet the fact that François has to argue it out on the asphalt, on equal terms, is a kind of humbling, a swallowing of pride.

François is forced to leave the citadel of the classroom, the home of his authority, and descend to the level of the playground to confront Esmeralda and Khoumba on the "skanks" issue. The classes at Françoise Dolto are all like that too - people talk loudly, but I've been there four years and it hasn't disturbed me at all. Everything else is spot-on, though: he gets along with his colleagues, has an intelligent teaching plan and is generally considered a good French teacher. Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs is being released in English-speaking countries as The Class, but a more accurate translation of its French title is Between the Walls, and that would be a very appropriate appellation for this remarkable film. During the next class, despite the confidential nature of the teachers' conference, the two girls tell the others that François had it in for Souleymane.

The film was warmly reviewed by the critic Philip French who noted: "There is a remarkable French tradition of school films, extending from Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite, to Nicolas Philibert's Être et avoir.