In the uneven pantheon of directorial debuts by actors, Natalie Portman's A Tale of Love and Darkness is among the more assured and auspicious. The film is a wistful, often non-linear coming-of-age story adapted from Israeli author Amos Oz's memoir of the same name and set in Jerusalem after the Second World War. Amos, played as an adolescent by Amir Tessler, observes his Lithuanian father (Gilad Kahana)—scholarly, soft, a man possessed by etymology and clad in tweed—and his Polish mother (Portman), who dotes on him and cultivates his imagination while contending with her own mental illness and, her son believes, disenchantment with life amid conflict in the desert after a privileged European upbringing. Their closely observed moments of domestic pain and pleasure play out against nothing short of the convulsive, hard-fought founding of the state of Israel after the end of the British mandate. Portman, who delivers her dialogue in Hebrew alongside the rest of the cast, crafts a highly literary historical drama long on mood and texture. It is a film to unload allusion by allusion and dreamy image by dreamy image as it addresses various questions, including the way life experience tends to complicate a child's magnified, romanticized view of his or her parents, as well as the profound chasm separating the idea of revolution and revolt (the danger, the intrigue, the sex, the surge of patriotic or cultural pride) from the day-to-day experience of it, complete with abrupt death and punishing scarcity. The film can tend toward the esoteric and the abstract, but it is also infused with a certain plaintive vulnerability; the two poles balance each other nicely, and nearly every frame is a testament to Portman's sense of gratitude and responsibility in guiding Oz's autobiography to the screen.

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