Dramatically intense and relentlessly grim Israeli drama about the complex relationship between an aging prostitute and her teenage daughter.

| Original Score: B | Jun 17, 2011

Yedaya is respectful and sensitive of everyone in Or's life and creates a beautiful, complex and rich relationship between mother and daughter...

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 15, 2005

Detail after detail, Yedaya charts the emotional push-pull between daughter and mother and their internal turmoils.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 15, 2005

A worthy downer, marred only by a queasy feel of exploitation in the final frames. In Yedaya's world, nobody gets off easy, including the audience.

Full Review | Sep 15, 2005

Her movie is indeed ambitious and her goals admirable. But sometimes it seems more position paper than cinema.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2005

Yedaya's starkly photographed first feature is as much a social statement as a character study.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 15, 2005

Its broken heart of gold is in the right place.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 15, 2005

A work of exceptional subtlety and is all the more captivating and heart-rending for being so.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2005

Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2005

This movie seems to be meditating on the whys and hows of the spoiling process -- raising more questions than can possibly be answered, and in this sense, at least, far from dogmatic.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 5, 2005

| Original Score: C | Jul 5, 2005

Ms. Yedaya may have made a subtler and more interesting film about prostitution than she originally intended.

| Jun 23, 2005

OR observes a moral and psychological distance form its characters that is maddeningly, heartbreakingly irresolute.

| Jun 21, 2005

Yedaya's stark, rigorously naturalistic style recalls neorealism, but she tells her sad tale without an ounce of the usual sentimentality.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 3, 2005

Even as Or joins an escort service and begins to follow in her mother's footsteps, Yedaya holds out hope that the girl will stop trying to rescue Mom and save herself.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 3, 2005

A raw drama from Israeli director Keren Yedaya.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 3, 2005

Acted and directed with uncommon psychological realism.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 2, 2005

With a cool head and level gaze, Keren Ye-daya's stark first feature attempts a Bressonian trajectory of tragic inevitability.

| May 31, 2005

[Director/writer Keren] Yedaya offers no facile explanations, which may be frustrating to some, but bluntly thought provoking to others.

| Original Score: '3/5' | May 26, 2005

A depressing look at life among some working-class women in Israel.

| May 19, 2005