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100It's a mystery wrapped inside an enigmatic nation, flawlessly acted and difficult to predict. I'm always impressed when a movie informs about a foreign culture while it entertains, and this one is powerful art in that regard.
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100The story winds its way over the material, forcing the characters and the viewers to constantly reassess everything they have seen and heard.
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100The movie has such a profound and compassionate understanding of human behavior, family ties and the way ordinary people respond when they're forced into a moral quandary, I can't imagine anyone not being transfixed by it.
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100A 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.
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100This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.
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100The film is a singular achievement, a piece of realist cinema with the pull of a suspense thriller.
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100The movie is hugely compelling on a moral and emotional level - I was completely hooked - yet it also revealed to me in numerous small and concrete ways what it's like to live in a contemporary theocracy.
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100The actors, as sometimes happens, create those miracles that can endow a film with conviction. Moadi and Hatami, as husband and wife, succeed in convincing us their characters are acting from genuine motives.
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100Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation.
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100Farhadi is no mere formalist. His film is a spiritual investigation into the rise of women and the descent of male privilege in Iran, and a look at the toll that has taken. In a movie of flawless acting, it is Moadi - terse, proud, angry, haunted - who shows us that rare thing: a soul in transition.
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100Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be.
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100However ripe A Separation might seem for being adapted into a smart American film, Hollywood shouldn't bother. Farhadi's movie is just about perfect as it is.
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100Something close to a contemporary masterwork, and maybe the best foreign-language film of the year, right at the tail end.
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100A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.
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100A film that captures the drama and suspense of real life as urgently as any picture released this year.
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100A Separation is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised.
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100The members of the cast represent ensemble, naturalistic acting at its finest.
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100Sophisticated and universal yet deeply intimate, A Separation is an exquisitely conceived family drama that has the coiled power of a top-notch thriller.
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100Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.
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100It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.
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100The drama it might remind you most of, oddly enough, is "Six Degrees of Separation," also about the snowballing connections between unlikely people. And as in that urban clash, the bedrock of it all is social responsibility, ever crumbling and rebuilding. A total triumph.
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91It happens to be splendidly acted and to be poised, as a narrative, on a knife's edge (the final shot, at a great moment of indecision, is utterly haunting). But, chiefly, it's a portrait of an essential and sympathetic human dilemma, and in that it's both real and timeless in ways that transcend borders, cultures and languages.
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90What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem.
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Jan 4, 201290As in all the director's work, the cast is given top consideration and their realistic acting results in unusual depth of characterization.
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Jan 4, 201290Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging.
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90The writer and director, Asghar Farhadi, has thus created the perfect antithesis of a crunching disaster flick, such as "2012," which was all boom and no ripple.
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88Every time it starts to feel like something we have known, we realize how unlike us these Iranian characters are.
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88Although it's slow to unfold, this courtroom drama is so timelessly humane and even-handed it feels like it came from the dockets of Solomon - by way of Sidney Lumet.
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88It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.
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88It is a mystery and a courtroom drama. Above all, however, it is a tale of love and sacrifice.
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88Much like Robert Altman during his forays into the genre, writer/director Asghar Farhadi isn't really interested in the answers. Instead, he keeps expanding the questions, until that singular title comes to seem a misnomer.
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88A Separation is a landmark film. No way will you be able to get it out of your head.
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88Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.
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85A Separation doesn't try to make easy sense of that world, or of this family's suffering. It's simply a quiet cry of anguish.
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80It's the little moments in Farhadi's film that are its most important, speaking every bit as loudly as its big, narrative-driving moments.
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80Meticulously thoughtful and economical in its execution, from its camerawork to its editing, Farhadi's carefully wrought narrative and the ways it handles the fragile emotions of its characters truly sets it apart, not only from contemporary Iranian cinema but world cinema in general.
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80Powerful art cinema that challenges political and social unity in Iran.
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80It is a rigorously honest movie about the difficulties of being honest, a film that tries to be truthful about the slipperiness of truth.
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80Together and apart, Hatami and Maadi are magnetic. Hatami, a star in Iranian cinema, lets us see Simin's intelligence and defiant sense of self-worth often with nothing more than a gesture.
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80What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.
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75In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 52 out of 55
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Mixed: 1 out of 55
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Negative: 2 out of 55
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9This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.