Metacritic reviews

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

Like mother, like daughter best sums up Or (My Treasure), a raw drama.

Consistently engaging, non-judgmental and cumulatively powerful two-hander marks a noteworthy feature debut for Israeli helmer Keren Yedaya.

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.

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.

Insofar as they're implicitly the spoils of war, this movie seems to be meditating on the whys and hows of the spoiling process -- raising more questions than can possibly be answered, and in this sense, at least, far from dogmatic.

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

The scoreless Or (My Treasure) consists solely of stationary shots that, while sometimes awkwardly composed, build in organic momentum and bracing detail.

This well-meaning but irritatingly naïve feature delves into the horrors of prostitution, or more accurately, the filmmaker's horror about the subject.

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.