Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Typically, a movie gets just one opening gambit, and most are too scared to take the opportunity. Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation gets two, and it makes both of them count: first, we see passports being photocopied, from a perspective inside the copier, one after the other, a different one every time, without anyone ever coming […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/15 World premiere: 14 May, 2011, Cannes Film Festival There have been many films about the confounded lot of women in contemporary Iran (and given how incredibly shitty that lot seems to be, it’s not the sort of thing I feel compelled to complain about), and on that […]

To my mind, Iran currently has one of the most interesting and important national cinemas in the world right now, so About Elly is a film for which I had, perhaps, unreasonably high expectations. On first glance, it’s rather unlike what we’ve become accustomed to thinking about when we think about Iranian cinema; and this […]

The leading face in contemporary Iranian cinema, director Abbas Kiarostami can hardly be accused of making accessible, obvious films. Nor does his wonderful 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us even count as his easiest work, though with its inexpressibly dry, absurdist sense of humor, it’s possibly his most entertaining, given a flexible definition of […]

The Song of Sparrows is an easy, charming crowd-pleaser, produced by Iran’s resident master of crowd-pleasers, Majid Majidi (whose Children of Heaven was an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, making it perhaps unsurprising that Song of Sparrows was just announced as Iran’s submission for that category this year). None of which should be […]

On the one hand, I had one of those great film festival moments with Scream of the Ants, where the print of the movie was caught in the mail and so we had to watch a screener DVD. On the other hand, a screener DVD was self-evidently not the best way to see the film, […]