99% A Separation

All Critics (135) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (134) | Rotten (1) | DVD (2)

Dynamically shot and paced like a thriller, the film has the density and moral prickliness of a good novel.

These people seem so real they might live next door. And they probably do.

Very few movies capture as convincingly as A Separation does the ways in which seemingly honorable decisions can lead to interpersonal conflict -- even disaster.

To say the piercing Iranian film A Separation is about divorce is a bit like saying The Wizard of Oz is about a pair of slippers.

"A Separation" moves beyond one couple's sundering marriage to reveal growing rifts between generations, ideologies, religious mind-sets, genders and classes in contemporary Iran.

"A Separation" is a great movie, a look inside a world so foreign that it might as well be another planet, yet so universal that its observations are painfully familiar to anyone, anywhere.

... subtlety and a sense of profound decency ...

A clever, insightful and heartfelt examination of human frailty that makes watching subtitles seem like a breeze.

It's fast paced, exciting, thrilling, edgy, moving, engaging, and - in its portrait of a justice system almost radically alien to the one I live under - absolutely fascinating.

Although the film might serve as a portrait of Iran's two conflicting social groups as reflected in the Green movement/Ahmadinejad clashes, it is much more about moral contradictions that any society has to face. A masterpiece.

It's the little moments in Farhadi's film that are its most important, speaking every bit as loudly as its big, narrative-driving moments.

If any one film can re-inject life into an entire national cinema, it's A Separation.

You may also find that some aspects of this very foreign story seem disturbingly not all that foreign.

An outsider could see these characters as misguided. That's not the reality however. Farhadi slips us into their shoes and we appreciate each of their perspectives.

Asghar Farhadi has written a superb screenplay and directs it with equal brilliance. He has managed to make a film that says something about the state of affairs in his Iran and weaves that message into an engrossing tapestry of mystery and drama.

The complex realities of human emotions and experience are more than sufficient to carry a film, and Farhadi doesn't let fussy direction or attempts to be overly clever get in the way of letting this brilliant, quietly insightful story unfold.

A clarion cry that cuts through the xenophobic clutter and the dense fog of war to show that not everyone "over there" is a boogeyman waiting to jump out of the closet. If that sounds terribly simplistic, just consider where we live.

A Separation is more than a character study; it's a deftly plotted drama that unfolds layer after layer and will leave you asking all kinds of questions about your beliefs and moral judgments. Fascinating stuff.

The story has no winners, and the daringly ambiguous ending defies simple conclusions. Even the title can be taken multiple ways.

The movie opens the door on a foreign culture, yet the people do not seem that dissimilar. .... They deal with some of the same struggles ... -- generational and class conflicts, ideological differences, and connecting and communicating emotionally.

A devastating portrait of two families in crisis, with their class differences representing the title's true 'separation.'

"A Separation" deals with some very murky issues, but it does so with astonishing clarity.

The movie is a singular mix of the foreign and the familiar, but is it the best 2011 film in the whole wide world? A 99? I can't say that I concur with my colleagues on that score.

A Separation explores how presumed social norms are extremely tenuous and how threats to these almost illusory ideas can threaten our sense of personal security.

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