With the urgency of a good thriller and the clarity of a fable, World War III is the grueling but compelling tale of how one of life’s victims learns to imitate his oppressors. Largely unspooling on the set of a bad film being made about the Holocaust, Iranian Houman Seyedi’s sixth feature starts out as jet-black comedy before darkening still further into tragedy, a journey embodied in an absorbing and extraordinary central performance by Mohsen Tanabandeh as the film’s downtrodden hero. https://youtu.be/4BnUJCousqY Seyedi’s work has regularly won acclaim at home, and the premiere of World War III in Venice’s Orizzonti…
Browsing: Film Reviews
“A Hero” is the apex of Farhadi’s cinematic development. This Film exemplifies all the characteristics of Fahrad’s style and it’s the perfect example to comprehend his Cinema. While viewing “A Hero” it feels that we are witnessing everyday life events without any middlemen. Although all filmmaking elements have been arranged in detail, they are hidden from our perception. The narrative appears to be simple, however, there are numerous layers and nuances that are difficult to perceive. Every time we view this film, a new aspect of the film is discovered. The characters appear as ordinary people who are neither bad…
New York Film Festival With its tableau aesthetics and mechanical humor (in Bergsonian terms), Social Hygiene is a hilarious take on the ridiculousness of performative decorum in our social interactions. A satire of social norms and human communication in long static shots immediately reminds us of the master of this cinema, Roy Andersson, with his “human trilogy.” But Denis Cote’s film is full of dialogue, unlike the quiet cinema of Andersson. While Andersson focuses on humans’ inability to communicate with each other, Cote is more interested in how we waste words, time, and our own emotions by depending on arbitrary…
The new film by Leos Carax, the winner of Best Director at Cannes Film Festival, is a must-see, but will the audience “miss the joke,” the same way many did for similar satires, like Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) and Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)? While the first half of Annette can feel staggering, the second half is everything, narratively and stylistically. Making a satire about cancel culture, media exploitation, herd mentality, public elevation and destruction of celebrities by manufacturing mass consent, and how all of that destroy individuals and the society as a whole, in the middle of…
“Sun Children” opens with a series of striking shots. A montage rifles through images of swanky car hoods as a band of pint-size carjackers try to find their pick in a garage; a boy runs through Tehran, the streets rippling around him like water; kids frolic in a circular pool that, shot from above, sparkles like a blue sun. Majid Majidi’s latest feature doesn’t lack in style or charm, using a child’s perspective — a staple in Iranian cinema — to locate beauty and hope in a cynical world. As is often the case with the director’s work, however, precious…
Since I watched Amélie, the brilliant, romantic and poetic French film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet that carried a treasure of classy humor, I have been exploring the world cinema to find other films that could offer the same qualities. It took almost twenty years for me to watch another film as good as Amélie. NETFLIX’s Enola Holms holds an incredible level of delicate imagination and a wise and clever sense of humor. Enola Holmes is about a clever and independent teenage girl that happens to be Sherlock Holms younger sister. Enola has had a very close relationship with her imaginative…
After falling in love with Money Heist, the NETFLIX blockbuster, I called many of my friends in the film industry and film media in Iran and in Europe to find out if they share my passion towards this series. I was not surprised when most of them agreed with me on Money Heist’s uniqueness and beauty. It has been almost over 35 years that I am writing about movies and TV series and only God knows how many TV series I have watched over my lifetime. (I usually watch between 2 to five episodes of TV shows every day) but…
One of the magics of Netflix is making it possible for millions of people to be able to watch the masterpieces made by great international filmmakers of our time. It is also a favor to the international filmmakers that in the traditional way of film distribution, their films in theaters, could only attract a few thousands of audiences at most. Two times Oscar winner, Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, which is also his latest film has been available on Netflix in the past few months. Like his other films, A separation and The Salesman, he’s focusing on characters and situations they…
I woke up today to a powerful and beautiful short film by Iranian/Dutch filmmaker, Reza Alamezadeh, My Corona Days Days Tale. This well thought and carefully shot using the social distancing rules by guidance of the filmmaker living in isolation at quarantine at his home from his granddaughter and her family. Reza Alamezadeh’s My Corona Days Days Tale with no doubt is the best short film I have seen so far dealing with our new way of life under the threat of the Coronavirus. Rexza casts a ray of hope to our lives and shows the way to other filmmakers to start…
Not only as a film critic, as someone that is under the spell of the silver screen, I love movies with fresh and new ideas. I rather watch an unperfect film that has a flame inside than a perfect cold movie. That is why watching Soroush Sehat’s Dance With Me! I loved it and enjoyed it, even if it has some flows and could have been even a better film. But it is one of the rare films from new wave of the Iranian films that does not have Asghar Farhadi or Abbas Kia Rostami syndrome. It stands well on…