The Kindergarten Teacher

Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive Policeman (2011) is as smart, unsettling, and nuanced as any piece of storytelling that you’re likely to see all year. A Tel Aviv kindergarten teacher discovers that her five-year-old student has a prodigious gift for poetry. Amazed and inspired by the boy, she decides to protect his talent through increasingly extreme measures until the question of what exactly she’s protecting becomes unclear. Through shape-shifting ambiguities and keen filmmaking, the film remarkably shows us that, in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad. (119 mins., DCP)