Critics reviews

Today, when any film with a vaguely Instagram look is celebrated as the truest portrait of our times, The Kindergarten Teacher takes a far more intricate path: instead of superficially imitating the world, it develops an elaborate formal and narrative system so as to reflect on the contemporary beliefs and uncertainties brought on by the twin crises of art and authorship.

The Kindergarten Teacher is far from a perfect movie — there's an archness and deliberateness to the dialogue that doesn't always do justice to the complicated emotions the film evokes. If you read this instead of seeing it, or saw it performed on a stage, everything would feel a little too on-the-nose. But Lapid's thrilling use of the camera, the way his unbalanced frame and his imaginative staging work with the precision of his story, results in something new and genuinely unnerving.

All of this makes it that much harder to decide what The Kindergarten Teacher means—but you certainly know how it feels, and how deeply strange it feels. At one point, there's a reference to André Breton on the subject of dreaming: before going to bed at night, he would put up a sign reading, "Do not disturb. Poet at work." But Breton also said: "Beauty will be convulsive, or not at all." And it's the convulsiveness of Lapid's film that makes it beautiful, and beautifully perplexing.

Nobody in The Kindergarten Teacher functions as a credible human being, and the film's ostensible theme—fear of the artist in a materialistic world—is merely presented in slow motion rather than explored.

Larry offers a subtle portrait of a woman who's ordinary on the surface, but decidedly abnormal underneath. The concept would work better if Yoav's poems soared, but they're merely pleasant. The movie eventually reveals itself as a wispy, good-looking riff on "Amadeus," with poor Yoav standing in for Mozart, while Nira never becomes as mordantly fascinating as the composer's rival Salieri.

Refreshingly, The Kindergarten Teacher offers a view of Israeli society that sidesteps the usual clichés. There are no images of Benjamin Netanyahu ranting away. The film barely acknowledges the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead, it includes a black (possibly Ethiopian-Jewish) character and touches on the tension between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. (Nira is one of the latter.)

In rendering Nira and Yoav's urban world, Lapid and DP Shai Goldman create compositions that are at once incisive and enigmatic, often shooting at a child's eye level and showing both old-soul wisdom and endearing worry in Schnaidman's terrific face. But rather than just depict human oddity, Lapid's film leaves us with the insights of an essay on art.

Another stellar filmmaker, Nadav Lapid, showcases his uncompromising, assured storytelling in The Kindergarten Teacher...

One of the standouts in this year's festival, "The Kindergarten Teacher" uses a savagely political lens to track one woman's passage into madness or maybe clarity... The director Nadav Lapid has loosened the exacting visual style he deployed in his debut feature, "Policeman," but his politics still cut.

At first blush a less elaborate, and certainly less searing, work than its predecessor, Lapid's latest in fact integrates a greater index of themes and ideas into its highly self-reflexive framework.

Lapid (Policeman) has a keen eye, and this second collaboration with cinematographer Shai Goldman is visually complicated, the camera waltzing smoothly back and forth and around the kindergarten class with barely an interruption. You expect such coordination on the stage, but it's rare in a movie, especially one full of pre-K children. Goldman knows how to film the more intimate scenes, too.

As he decenters everything but the Hatikvah, Lapid's provocations generate a profound imbalance that may never be restored—but his uncanny ability to observe those contradictions is itself poetic justice.