A few years ago I was talking to a friend who had just seen David Gordon Green's "All the Real Girls." My friend isn't much of a film buff, but he knew that he'd seen something special. When I asked what he liked most about it, he didn't say anything about the acting or the direction or nuances of the plot. Instead, he simply said "because that stuff really happened."

Of course, my friend was not speaking literally. Instead, I think he was trying to talk about a feeling that the movie captured that transcends what we generally consider realism. It struck a nerve with him because it resonated in a deeper way than he could have ever expected. It…

From the acclaimed writer-director of About Elly & Fireworks Wednesday, A Separation is Asghar Farhadi’s finest offering to world cinema that not only works as his best film to date but with this masterpiece, he may have very well crafted his magnum opus. Simplest in approach, minimalist in presentation, economic in creation & artistically subtle, A Separation is one of the perfectly flawless films of 21st century cinema and arguably the finest that Cinema of Iran has offered us so far. It’s a riveting, suspenseful drama that is highly gripping & involving, tough to let go, morally & emotionally draining but in the end, is absolutely worth your time & money.

A Separation tells the story of an Iranian middle-class family. Nader & Simin are separating…

Once in a while there comes along a film that features characters who you think couldn't be more different from you, but whom you start to feel for as though they were part of your own family, as though you share a life with them. And by the end of the experience, you know that something inside you has shifted. You begin to make room for new ideas, new ways of thinking.

I've watched only a handful of films that have done that to me, and A Separation is foremost among them. I don't want to explain the plot too much; the less that viewers know going in, the better their experience will be.

Besides, A Separation is the rare…

One of the greatest films ever made and still my pick for the best film of the decade, if not the century.

The first scene of Asghar Farhadi's masterpiece A Separation opens with a married couple - Nader and Simin - arguing in front of a judge over their petition for divorce. This single scene, filmed in one long take, epitomizes Farhadi's incredible style of storytelling. He takes a simple scenario and fills it with nuanced characters, moral complexity, and cultural conflict. In the scene, Nader and Simin are arguing over the custody of their daughter Termeh. Simin wants to leave Iran so that Termeh may receive a better education and have a brighter future while Nader wants to stay…

I recently made some comments regarding the MCU and I want to explain. If you like the MCU that's great. The films are very cool, very fun, there's a ton of great action, there's a lot of story and plot and characters to get attached to. There's a lot to enjoy. But the key is that beyond immediate enjoyment, the films are empty. They're made by corporate machines with nothing on their minds other than dollar signs. The scripts are written not by humans and not with heart, and the singular focus is on how the product (or "movie" as you or I might call it) can have the largest possible appeal to the most amount of people.

Then there's…

95/100

[originally written on my blog]

Previously addressed here, though I now repudiate my assessment of its visual scheme as "purely functional"—Farhadi has an elegant, fluid sense of how to organize chaotic human behavior for maximum expressiveness, one that extends well beyond his rather obvious (but still effective) strategy of placing physical barriers (usually glass) between characters in nearly every shot. (I think it seemed less impressive to me than About Elly the first time simply because this one takes place in the city, mostly indoors; it's hard to beat the seaside for ready-made grandeur.) Second viewing turned it into a slow-motion disaster movie, as I was even more cruelly aware of various points at which the entire mess could…

Becoming one of the Top 20 best Iranian films in my book, Asghar Farhadi puts the Iranian industry in the celluloid map once again with a film that works remarkably as an essay on responsibility and lack of communication. Lack of communication leads to lack of trust. Lack of trust leads to loneliness. Loneliness leads to depression. Depression leads to suffering. Suffering, in one way or another, is transmitted to others, and has many ways to manifest depending on your personality. We see this axiomatic spiral in one of the most memorable films of 2011. It doesn't matter where you come from, or where you were born; family matters come first, and they should be treated responsibly, with an open…

There are a number of all-too-common but inherently present issues to take from this movie; the dangers of bull-headed self-righteousness; the refusal to be conciliatory; the damage done to children when they lose the only family they've ever known; what desperation can drive us to do or become. Then there's the loss not just of an 'innocence', but the loss Termeh feels here as she loses real faith in her father's character; his credibility.
The father gives a strong impression of a man who was once much more than he is now- a cynical, unhappy man, always ready with excuses for his failings or someone else to put it on.
And Farhadi uses class status, poverty, and the paralyzing effects…

Masterful acting, gripping dialogue and brilliant screenplay, And still - this film is not perfect.
Its first problem is its pace, it takes about 40 minutes to get the plot moving and actually start the movie, and the ending drags a bit too much in my opinion.
The second problem I have with this film is to do with its marketing actually - this film is called "A Seperation", every synopsis of it talks about the parents' divorce and dilemma and Leila Hatami is displayed as the main character. When in reality the divorce/seperation plot is the most minor plotline in the whole movie, and Leila has less screen time than most of the characters including her daughter (who is…