The Class and The Last King of Scotland reviews

The Class is a French film set in an inner-city Paris school, telling the story of one particular difficult class and its teacher's attempts to maintain control and impart useful knowledge.  It's shot and acted in a very realistic style, which means it doesn't have a clear-cut plot structure, but certainly imbues it with uncomfortable familiarity for anyone who has tried to teach unruly kids.  It doesn't take much to remind me how glad I am that I'm not teaching any more, and this film delivered that feeling in spades.


( Last King of Scotland - spoilers )

Hotel du Lac review

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner is beautifully written, very funny in places, and reads so much like a 19th century novel that I was shocked out of the narrative when someone mentioned a colour television.  It's a rare heroine that I really identify with, but I understood Edith Hope completely.  Up until the very last page, I thought it was going to have an extremely satisfying ending that subverted all expectations of genre - and then it went somewhere else that I was expecting even less.  It left me very confused as to its message, if it has one - this is definitely one to lend out and then discuss!  Wonderful narrative, though, and certainly an author I'll be looking up again.