Metacritic reviews

Funny, exuberant and shamelessly seductive, Yossi is an unabashedly populist entertainment with a spirit conciliatory enough to melt the heart of any naysayer.

For many of the film's brisk 84 minutes, Fox eclipses his earlier work-and several other same-sex tragedies-by immersing us in his protagonist's quiet turmoil.

The film is at its finest as a catalogue of Yossi's unspoken ache, less so when it begins to flirt with the clichés of the love story.

In its superior first half, Yossi sustains a mood of wistful longing and inexorable loneliness as its directionless protagonist lumbers through a grey, joyless existence, but the film threatens to turn into a gay Israeli version of "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" once Knoller finds his impossibly gorgeous, persistent dream man.

It's a film full of tenderness, resting on a tremendous, sad performance from Knoller.

The perfectly sculpted, entirely sure-of-himself Tom ultimately seems more of a construct than a character, his carefree nature shaped almost entirely by the very wish-fulfillment clichés that the movie otherwise sidesteps.

This is a perceptive, warm-hearted work, anchored by Knoller's impressively less-is-more performance.

You'll want to see Eytan Fox's acclaimed 2002 drama "Yossi & Jagger" before watching this intimate, often-moving sequel.

Yossi spends much of its 84 minutes with a passive hero. This older Yossi is a vestige of the man he once was, an overweight and hollow-eyed vestige who drags himself through his daily rounds and solitary nights. Mr. Knoller's performance is admirable, and Yossi does find new reasons to embrace life. But his rebirth comes only after a very long requiem.

What began as a reasonably hardheaded look at profound and rapid cultural change turns into a feel-good fantasy of salvation.