The art form stripped down to its most necessary functions: it's fitting that Abbas Kiarostami's final film, 24 Frames -- a stone cold masterpiece of the highest order and one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 21st century so far -- should be about extending the still image beyond its confines and exploring its elastic temporality through a cinematic perspective or, in other words, simultaneously resurrecting the dead and giving life to the merely "existent." Kiarostami's films, too, and this one in particular -- a minimal and meditative love letter to the world he'd soon be leaving behind and the landscapes, various creatures, and artistic mediums that inhabit it -- will allow the late, great Iranian master to become…

Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian postmodernist who died last summer at the age of 76, used to say that he preferred the kind of movies that put their audience to sleep. “Some films have made me doze off in the theater,” he would explain, “but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for for weeks.” So while I passed out (and passed out hard) roughly 15 minutes into “24 Frames,” the fascinating, posthumously completed non-narrative project that will serve as Kiarostami’s final farewell, I suspect that he wouldn’t take my unconsciousness as a criticism or a show of disrespect.

On the contrary, I…

69/100

A.V. Club review. Had I seen this with zero foreknowledge (minus the initial, proof-of-concept frame using "The Hunters in the Snow"), odds are I would have moderately enjoyed it at face value, as Kiarostami's version of something like Benning's 13 Lakes (which I did in fact moderately enjoy). Each shot is beautifully composed, and while I might have marveled at how frequently animals seem to spontaneously provide a mini-narrative, or noticed that some of their movements don't look entirely natural, the degree of manipulation involved almost certainly would not have occurred to me. Once you know what's going on, though—and Kiarostami (or someone, anyway) makes a point of telling you up front—elements that would otherwise have been merely pleasing…

89

A photo-chemical reversal. The beginning of Abbas Kiarostami's final film, depicting 'The Hunters in the Snow' from 1565, is a birth of the universe moment from which all of cinema bellowed out, much like the smoke stacks given life as the painting begins to be (selectively) animated. Each image is a complete existence, contextualized by sound and living things passing in and out of frame, a reminder of what is beyond and what is visible. They're encased in time - frozen, forever the same, and yet they move with startling unpredictability. Each 'frame' is constructed out of many, many individual frames, but their fixed nature doesn't cancel a potent sense of replication - a lack of capture giving way…

The opening and closing frames suggest a much more interesting movie that the one that we got. The artificiality of the compositing that's pleasing when adding photographic elements to the painting in Frame 1, are frequently off-putting when applied to the 22 photographs that separate Frame 1 from Frame 24. The homogeneity of the images and image elements, while I can see they might make sense as a schematic premise, become tedious in the experience. Not that there aren't some departures and some pleasant frames in those segments, but between the overall sameness, the unnatural interactions (or lack thereof) of overlayed images with their backgrounds and apparent foundations, jumps in the photographic animation and inserted element clips, and the frequent…