Please don’t stab the critic!

Here’s a line that I wish I could have used in a movie review: “I hated that movie so much that I wanted to go on screen and stab everybody.”

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s violent and brutal and troublesome … blah-blah-blah. It’s also one of the most honest reactions to a work of art that I’ve ever heard.

The work of art in question was “The Class,” which is the English-language title of the French film “Entre les murs” (or “Between the Walls”). The criticism was delivered by one of the students in Jamie Neely’s Eastern Washington University journalism class.

I don’t agree with the opinion, and I said as much at the time. Then again, I’m not sure that I love the film quite as much as my two “Movies 101” co-hosts, Bob Glatzer and Mary Pat Treuthart (who, I’m proud to say, is my wife).

“The Class” is a documentary-like narrative film that explores what happens between a Parisian middle-school class and its teacher, both the bad and the good. My only real problem with the movie is that it doesn’t seem to have an ending – or at least an ending that I find satisfying.

But as I said during today’s taping of “Movies 101,” which will air on KSFC Saturday night, that may be my problem and not the film’s. My expectations may have been shaped too much by the kind of mainstream school-movie stuff that Hollywood tends to throw up on the big screen – movies such as “Freedom Writers” or “Mr. Holland’s Opus” or, God forbid, “Dangerous Minds.”

“The Class” confounds those expectations. Which is something that I appreciate, even if I don’t find it satisfying.

In any event, nothing about the film makes me want to run up on the screen and stab anybody.

Damn, though, I do wish that the movie provoked me to feel that kind of passion.