Critics reviews

It has a beautifully understated feel for the subtle shifts in internal teenage emotional life in its portrayal of a group of classmates through episodes that accumulate a quiet force. We share the bewilderment of Elin (Eva Gram Schjoldager) as through a gradual shift she loses popularity and is ostracised from her group of friends.

Caustic images of sexual awakening recall Goodbye, Columbus and L'Origine du Monde, as the film's darting energy—filmed over two years to enhance the subjects' precociousness—navigates intuitively between cruelty and grace.

It's the women who take pride of place in Malmros's masterpiece, Tree of Knowledge: a series of exquisitely staged, expansive vignettes that accumulate with quietly shattering force.

Nils Malmros's absolutely wondrous Tree of Knowledge came as a revelation—and I'm not prone to those... Made over the course of two years so that his cast of nonprofessional actors could grow up on screen, it's among the most moving and delightful films about childhood I've ever seen.