Tonally uneven and tries too hard to be captivating, Panah Panahi’s tragicomic debut feature is a mixed bag of a road movie, despite the picturesque cinematography and some genuine moments of human empathy.
A Best Director winner at the Berlinale, Farhadi weaves a complex web of human relationships that become incredibly strained when a young woman mysteriously disappears in this riotous if unsettling drama.
Women seem to know the answer to men’s problems in this superlative suspenseful drama from Farhadi, as suspected infidelity threatens to ruin the lives of a married couple.
Farhadi’s second feature is, in hindsight, a companion piece to A Hero—while it lacks the nuance of his later works, one can already witness his penchant for telling intricately-plotted dramas about morality.
The finest film Farhadi has put out in years—here he skilfully draws out a complex, delicate drama with weighty themes of morality, truth and honour from a simple premise: a debt-ridden prisoner and a bag of gold coins.
Kiarostami shoots the close-ups of more than a hundred actresses as they watch a theatrical presentation unfold in this conceptually bold but ultimately uninvolving treatise on the nature of spectatorship.
It runs a little out of steam by the end, but Kiarostami’s breakthrough experiment with the digital video camera is a revelation as the private, unfiltered conversations in a car become wrestling bouts against patriarchy, served with ten ‘dings’ of the bell.
Kiarostami’s observant eye for landscapes and people reaches its apotheosis here in this graceful, if sometimes elusive, meditation on life and mortality.
It may be at times contrived and slow-moving, but this Iranian drama about the impact of a wrongful state execution on a family accumulates enough power to work.
Kiarostami closes his wondrous ‘Koker’ trilogy with an even more multi-layered, meta-cinematic experiment in the guise of a love story.
Eternality Tan 