Variety

“[Kerry] Fox charges each encounter with a spark of disputatious energy — hectoring, cajoling, insulting. She’s like Stella Adler as an avant-garde cult leader.”
– Owen Gleiberman

Metro

– David Larsen

Screen Daily

“Humour and candor…thrills, insights and intrigue”
– Sarah Ward

IndieWire

“It’s an ovation-worthy performance, and enough to make you want an encore.”
– Michael Nordine

NYFF

“It’s a beautiful film with one of those endings that seems almost impossible to pull off, but she [Alison Maclean] does.”
– Kent Jones, NYFF selection committee Chair

NZ Flicks

“The Rehearsal mounts an enticing inquisition of performance, identity and moral anxiety with resonance far beyond its hothouse setting. Like the novel, the film (co-scripted with Emily Perkins) is as attentive to the misleading effect youthful nerve can have on the ‘mature’ as it is to the crises the teachers so blithely incite in the taught. It’s also its own sharp, original thing, a film by Alison Maclean, alive with ambiguity and cinematic verve.”
– Bill Gosden. NZIFF Director