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100A grand, romantic life story about love, loss, regret and the sadness that can be evoked by a violin - not only through music, but through the instrument itself. It is all melancholy and loss, and delightfully comedic, with enough but not too much magic realism. The story as it stands could be the scenario for an opera.
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88Although the story is mournful, the movie is buoyed by a heaven-scented surrealism.
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83Just as the plot combines fantastical and biographical elements-some of it is reportedly based on Satrapi's own family legends-so the filmmaking veers from straightforward to more outsized. The tonal shifts don't always work.
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83Adapting Satrapi's graphic novel about a violinist (Mathieu Amalric) in late-1950s Tehran who's got a broken fiddle and a broken heart and takes to his bed, willing himself to die, the filmmakers rely on expressive eyes to carry a narrative style suitable for a silent movie.
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83While visually scrumptious, the movie struggles to reach a greater profundity that it never quite obtains, but its childlike emulation of a grand tragedy is indelibly precious.
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80The result is captivating, but not exactly moving: Nasser-Ali's grand passion is posited rather than communicated, in spite of Mr. Amalric's exquisitely soulful performance.
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80You have no idea what's coming next, except that it will be wildly creative and beautiful. These two know how to mix up a very unusual and successful cinematic recipe.
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Aug 4, 201280Both winsome and sophisticated, Chicken with Plums unfolds like a rich Persian carpet woven of memories and nostalgia in a colorful fantasy Iran of 1958, twenty years before the Islamic Revolution turned the country to somber grays.
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75It's fascinating as an offbeat storytelling exercise.
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75Satrapi and Parronnaud give us clues but no solution. The fun, for those of us who like fairy tales, is in guessing.
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75Chicken With Plums has Iran in common with "Persepolis," but little else. Largely, though not entirely, live action, it's a fairly traditional story about thwarted love - a kind of fairy tale for grown-ups.
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75A whimsical, sad, diverting and altogether delightful exploration of how cinema can benefit, not only from glancing back at its own past, but by staying open to parallel forms of presentation and play.
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Aug 4, 201275A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.
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Aug 30, 201270It's not entirely satisfying, but there's plenty to savor in Chicken With Plums.
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Aug 4, 201270The same winning balance of seriousness and humor that made "Persepolis" such a hit works equally well in Chicken With Plums.
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67Fluctuating between the extraordinary and the dull, with sections of narrative explication and tangents, Chicken With Plums can be as frustrating as it is ambitious. It's more like Chicken With Plums – and the Kitchen Sink.
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63Amalric's performance is comically moving in the manner of silent actors, and the film is beautifully wrought with moments of enchantment. Alas, Chicken is a movie that begins with a crescendo and doesn't sustain its lyricism.
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63Chicken With Plums is not a thoroughly delectable concoction, but its exotic flavor is worth sampling.
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Aug 14, 201260The evocation of passionate love is palpable, what with Amalric's sad longing and Farahani's Nobel Prize–winning face and everything, and the honest undercurrent of melancholy keeps the whole thing from becoming unmoored.
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60There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.
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60Sit in the front – and don't peer too hard – and Chicken With Plums casts an undeniable spell. It is bold, exotic and distinctive, particularly during the animated angel of death sequence.
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Aug 17, 201250Fortunately, Chicken With Plums does have its pleasures, including Isabella Rossellini as the silkily jaded mother.
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42There are pleasures to be found in "Chicken with Plums" to be certain, but we'd hope for something a little more satisfying next time out from the directing team.
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25An agony of bad plotting and whimsical, lifeless scenes.