“Hit the road Jack and don’t you come back, No more, no more, no more, no more. Hit the road Jack and don’t you come back no more” — Percy Mayfield A road trip that builds on Abbas Kiarostami’s “A Taste of Cherry” and Jafar Panahi’s “Taxi,” Jafar’s son Panah has built on his father’s…
Quoting the statistic that 152 million children in the world are forced to work to support their families, Iranian director Majid Majidi’s Sun Children focuses on the street kids of Tehran — children of absent, addicted, or unemployed refugee parents, forced to sell trinkets on trains or buses, work in jobs that require manual labor…
“The real voyage of discovery lies in not seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes” — Marcel Proust The innocence of children has been one of the main themes of Iranian cinema in recent years. Films such as Majid Majidi’s “Children of Heaven,” Abbas Kiarostami’s “Where is the Friend’s Home?” and Jafar Panahi’s “The…
Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini, “About Elly”) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, “The Wedlock”), a childless married couple in their early thirties, are amateur actors playing the lead roles in a local production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” a play in which a good man’s virtue turns to hypocrisy and his marriage crumbles….
Oppression and fear stalk the environs of Babak Anvari’s superb Under the Shadow. Based on Anvari’s childhood experiences in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War, Under the Shadow brings subjugation, menace and a palatable sense of dread to the screen, with a political element that is constant but never overbearing. The film’s focus is domestic, portraying…
Looking through the windshield of a vehicle that gives the impression of being at rest, parked — no noise there, no movement; it is only the outside that moves: Other cars, people who stare, people who don’t give a damn, bicycles, motorcycles, and a red light at a distance tell us what we have been…
You don’t see the late ’70s or early ’80s get represented in the movies very often. Audiences are used to seeing movies set in the ’60s, during World War II or in the Old West, but seeing action take place in 1980 just feels foreign. Everybody still smokes (even on airplanes), shirt collars are enormous,…
