From her breakthrough performance in Secretary to HBO’s 70s sex worker drama The Deuce, Maggie Gyllenhaal has excelled with lead roles that flirt with transgression of varying kinds. The Kindergarten Teacher, which won the Dramatic Directing prize at last year’s Sundance, finds the actor on both familiar and new ground. In Sara Colangelo’s tense film, she plays Lisa, a teacher becoming uncomfortably close to a little boy in her care, attempting to nurture and, arguably, exploit his astonishing gifts for poetry with increasingly boundary-pushing methods. Any traits typical of a child prodigy drama (think Jodie Foster’s Little Man Tate) are upturned pretty quickly…
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