Director Laurent Cantet has pulled together a story that feels startlingly authentic, using Mike Leigh-like methods of extensive improvisation with a cast of real inner-city kids and a real teacher. To paraphrase the Buck Owens/Beatles hit, all they had

Class is a prep-school retread of The Graduate that knows some of its scenes are funny and some are serious, but never figures out quite how they should go together.

The result is a rather wishy-washy prep school version of The Graduate, but the comparison is merely a pale echo, trapped inside a banal resolution with troubling misogynist tendencies.

...the movie benefits from the affable work of its various performers.