Critic Reviews

Movies about assassins (“Nine Hours to Rama,” “The Gandhi Murder”) rarely get this deeply into the life and conditions that inspire a political murder. “Incitement,” which swept last year’s Israeli Academy Awards and was Israel’s entry as “Best International Feature” for Hollywood’s Oscars, manages to be both thorough, damning and fraught throughout.

Potently, Incitement depicts Amir as just one member of a self-reinforcing fringe.

A rare look into the mind of an assassin, Incitement provokes and disturbs.

A chilling portrait of how fanaticism can grow and be enabled, this is a matter-of-fact film that moves with an awful inexorability toward its foregone conclusion.

Admirably, Yaron Zilberman’s film focuses on the cyclical nature of violence in a decades-old conflict.

The extreme, sharply divisive, partisan language might have seemed a world away to us if we had seen it 25 years ago. Now, it seems chillingly close.

While Incitement is a compelling watch, with archival footage neatly woven in, and offers a salutary warning about how easily democracies are endangered, this psychological profile of a political assassin nevertheless falls into a kind of moral trap.