J. Hoberman Reviews Nadav Lapid's Insular New 'The Kindergarten Teacher'
The subject of writer-director Nadav Lapid’s latest movie is a precocious 5-year-old poet. Lapid, who is 40, can hardly be considered a child prodigy. Still, his two features, Policeman (2011), available through Netflix, and The Kindergarten Teacher (2014), which opens this Friday in New York, have made him the most internationally acclaimed Israeli filmmaker in recent memory… and perhaps ever.
Policeman, a multiple-award winner at the 2011 Jerusalem Film Festival, is a sardonic, deeply fascinating character study in which two violent, self-absorbed quasi-tribal groups—one a highly disciplined elite police commando unit, the other an anarchic band of left-wing Jewish terrorists—find each other, with predictable results, at the wedding of a billionaire’s daughter in contemporary Tel Aviv.
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