Or

Yedaya's prizewinning debut film is acted and directed with uncommon psychological realism.

Yedaya is respectful and sensitive of everyone in Or's life and creates a beautiful, complex and rich relationship between mother and daughter, loving and protective of each other, but not of themselves.

A work of exceptional subtlety and is all the more captivating and heart-rending for being so.

For long stretches, Or is a dialogue-heavy kitchen-sink drama, but its naturalistic style and unselfconscious performances give it an intensity that only builds as it progresses.

Israeli director Keren Yedaya's remarkable debut feature, which won the 2004 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or, is a powerful study of a teenager's willingness to do anything to save her mother, a Tel Aviv prostitute who may be well beyond salvation.

Suffers from long takes, no music score, naturalistic acting and an agenda so stifling it doesn't allow its characters to breathe.

Doggedly refusing artifice as if cinematic beauty were a filthy capitalist plot, Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.