Critics reviews

The film keeps you guessing, not only as to where the story’s going but what kind of film it will turn out to be. And while that’s ingenious and intriguing, there are flaws that I found either unnecessary or puzzling. For one, the other kids in the class might have been more fully and interestingly drawn.

The workshop serves as scaffolding for the increasingly voyeuristic push and pull between Olivia and the racist, volatile (yet brilliant) Antoine. The former is a revelatory caricature of a clueless liberal intellectual, drawn to her student by the possibility of demystifying the inner lives of the troubled subjects she so glibly writes about. Antoine, however, is an amalgamation of clichés about disaffected youth.

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.

The boldness of The Workshop inheres, paradoxically, in its reluctance to sensationalize at stylistic or narrative levels, at least up to a point. . . . That said, the movie strands itself between its desire to provoke and its refusal of hyperbole, withholding coherent perspectives on the urgent subjects it broaches. A welcome demonstration of nerve becomes a failure of one, its psychosexual politics vaguer and smaller than its earlier, edgier scrum over civic values and intramural violence.

A picture that seems modest on the surface but builds to a tense simmer, addressing, in an understated but affecting way, the insidious political tensions currently tearing at France... Cantet's picture is a stirring humanist work, one that offers no easy answers.

Both "The Workshop" and "Beats Per Minute" are heartfelt, deeply political talkathons from France.

Tackling once again the burning topics of the day - in this case France at political and demographic crossroads - with subtle intelligence and a profoundly humanistic touch, Laurent Cantet (The Class) delivers a film that may be difficult to classify in generic terms, but should connect strongly with the arthouse and festival crowds that have admired his previous work.

As The Workshop progresses, it moves from a first act reminiscent of The Class in a more picturesque location, to something closer to Time Out and Cantet's breakthrough Human Resources, turning into a thriller where the characters are motivated by conditions of class as much as they are by something unexplainable they carry deep down inside.

What L'Atelier does best is the same as which made The Class sing: it's a film which demonstrates that debate, the exchange of ideas, can be as thrilling as any ramped up action flick... A final act steps away from the bracing workshop environment and into more conventional genre territory; and the picture loses some of its crackling energy at that point.