Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

I found this Israeli movie, which is like a family tragedy played as half-farce, to be messy and precious in ways that don’t really suit what’s best in it. But the characterizations — mostly of egotistical academics — are terrifically sharp, and it bounces off the brainy-verbal aspects of Talmudic scholarship in ways you don’t see coming. (While I can’t say I’ve ever longed to see a movie nail the peculiarities of academia in quite so accurate a fashion, I won’t deny that I appreciated the effort in this instance.) A scene in which the father uses his Asperger-y skills to suss out his son’s role in duping him is particularly good; it provides a thriller-style set-piece, and it serves as both a narrative summing up and a revelation of character (it grants us what no one else in the movie has — direct access to the old man’s brain). Director Joseph Cedar is a whiz at using cross-cutting techniques and compressed, multi-layered compositions to suggest the plate tectonic forces at work below the crust of professional and familial relationships. It helps that the actors are so persuasive. In particular, leads Lior Ashkenazi and Shlomo Bar-Aba make for a compelling contrast: the former is as open and sanguine as the latter is hermetic and perpetually aggrieved.