Critic Reviews

The Kindergarten Teacher is probably the only movie about poetry with an ending as tense as any thriller.

Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.

Gyllenhaal has been too good too often to label any one of her performances as her best, but she’s certainly never been better than she is here.

Gyllenhaal gives one of the most staggering performances of her career, and Colangelo’s deft command of tone keeps the lengths to which Lisa will go to stay close to Jimmy’s perceived greatness close to the chest right up to the end.

Rippling with psychological complexity and sneaky humor, this is a rich character study that takes constantly surprising turns.

Lisa’s drive is more than biological; it’s intellectual and emotional, and that’s what keeps what often risks becoming camp madness in an identifiably human place — almost all the way to the end.

Writer-director Sara Colangelo’s intimate, slender drama withholds much about its main character, which allows Gyllenhaal to sketch the outline of a fractured soul.

The Kindergarten Teacher dares us to work out for ourselves, from moment to moment, whether Lisa is a hero, a monster or something in-between

The Kindergarten Teacher may offer a less audacious, more stylistically muted version of its predecessor, but by the time its quietly perfect final shot arrives, the movie has reached the same provocative conclusion. It’s not poetry, exactly, but it’s pretty shattering prose.

Gyllenhaal is terrific as a teacher and wannabe poet who exploits a child prodigy in this gripping psychological drama.