The internationally acclaimed filmmaker's new 'The Kindergarten Teacher' takes Jewish insularity to terrific extremes.

| Aug 16, 2017

A perplexing but all-too-human psychological drama ...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 5, 2015

Poetry is dead - but maybe a five-year-old boy can save it, with the help of his kindergarten teacher.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 14, 2015

Lapid, following his acclaimed 2014 hostage drama "Policeman," clearly has a lot on his mind here. But he tells his overlong story in such a diffuse, at times elliptical way that his reach exceeds its grasp.

| Aug 13, 2015

Keeps its audience rapt until the quietly shattering conclusion.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 13, 2015

Bubbling beneath the troubling educational methods is a complicated conversation about art and the audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 12, 2015

On an immediate level, the film is a commentary on what we do with other people's words when we quote them-and in so doing, deform them, customizing them to our own requirements.

| Aug 6, 2015

A self-assured, remarkably powerful film from the Israeli writer-director Nadav Lapid.

| Jul 30, 2015

What is weird, and ultimately destructive, is the way that The Kindergarten Teacher conceptualizes its child prodigy.

| Original Score: C | Jul 30, 2015

Israeli director Nadav Lapid uses a well-worn concept - a lonely little boy is taken under a teacher's wing - to create a slow, creepy movie.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 29, 2015

Slightly mesmerizing performances from Larry and young Shnaidman just manage to sustain interest in this quiet story. Even if it's going nowhere.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 29, 2015

One of the most fascinating, if inscrutable films of the year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2015

Always engrossing but also perplexing and offering little deeper than the obvious, Teacher still reps a new development in a striking, idiosyncratic director.

| Jul 27, 2015

Writer-director Nadav Lapid not only makes this rich and rather strange tale convincing on screen, but he does so with the aesthetic prowess of a first-class auteur.

| Jul 27, 2015

While the basic setup of the drama would lead one to expect that the story will go into a kind of overblown substitute son/mother melodrama, Lapid has something else in mind entirely.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 27, 2015

The film's denouement is at once shocking and organic because it echoes a well-paced but nasty children's fable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 14, 2015

As a dramatist Lapid can be too oblique for his own good, and his story runs off the rails in the last half-hour.

| Oct 16, 2014