The Class rewrites the mercifully ill-represented inspirational teacher genre—Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, Little Man Tate, Pay It Forward—and its dross of a subgenre, the inspirational-white-teacher-moves-school-to-post-race-era film. Or just ignores the conventions altogether. Because what's good and what's bad about The Class is that it feels like the work of a man who's never seen a film before in his life—only iPod commercials. The non-story of a French public school teacher and his class of ethnic tokens, The Class is simply two-plus hours of observation, but gets it all right: the teacher (François Bégaudeau) who engages his students by mocking them; the sad student self-portrait that proudly proclaims, "I'd like to be a rapper" (and another: "I'd like to make love"); the packet of student writing the teacher makes for the class at the end of the year, with a title page badly formatted on Microsoft Word and a class photo on front. The teacher is less interested in inspiration than in getting through the year, or the period; his instincts are always, and increasingly, questionable. Still, when he obligingly responds to complaining students that their feelings, rather than their lives, are what's interesting, he's not just trying to finagle them into doing their writing assignment. He's making the film's bet, that real life is interesting.  David Phelps