- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100It's a troubling, courageous, compulsively watchable work of art.
-
100An engrossing tale of class differences that reveals tiny details of one man’s descent into hell.
-
100This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.
-
100Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster--a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values.
-
A flawlessly executed character study.
-
90Provides one of the rare glimpses of the upper class to come out of recent Iranian cinema--the last one in memory was 1996's exquisite, Ibsen-esque melodrama "Leila"--and director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) captures it vividly through his hero's wounded obsession.
-
90An extraordinary film in many ways, the least of which is its unorthodox casting.
-
90Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.
-
88A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.
-
88As in "Taxi Driver," the protagonist is a damaged war veteran, an invisible man who travels about the city and internalizes its contradictions until he explodes.
-
88It settles into the typical reflective mode of Iranian films, but something IS happening: A human being is slowly, sullenly, silently approaching his combustion point.
-
83As with many Iranian films, reality and fiction collide (the lead actor really is a pizza deliveryman), and the moral of the story is a surprisingly blunt critique of the growing inequality of wealth in the slowly Westernizing nation.
-
80The result is the work of a funereal yet darkly funny neorealist, sounding the rallying cry against the inflexible maxim casually delivered by one of his own film's characters.
-
80Through everyday actions and gestures -- in Hussein's awkward exchanges with other people, in his tender fumbling of his fiancée's purse -- Panahi shows a man for whom life has become increasingly arduous, alien. The filmmaker captures, in other words, what Bresson called "the force in the air before the storm."
-
80Succeeds as a universal account of frustration applicable to any urban center where the gap between haves and have-nots is tauntingly visible.
-
80Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.
-
75The success of Crimson Gold depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man.
-
75Another excellent example of how Iranian cinema uses deceptively simple techniques to decode devastating truths about human nature.
-
75Crimson Gold has been likened to an Iranian "Taxi Driver," but it's nothing of the sort, though it is powerful in a quiet, minimalist way.
-
70Not a great film, but a good one.
-
70The occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.
-
70Its characters are no different from the rest of us, in the cluster of their annoyances and kicks, yet utterly removed from us by a system that frowns upon ordinary desire. Jafar Panahi's movie, unsurprisingly, has been outlawed in Iran. Nobody likes a prophet. [19 January 2004, p. 93]
-
67A fable of money as the root of jealousy, discord, violence, but the film's slippery fascination as sociological exposé is the flip side of its thinness as drama.
-
63There's a subtlety to Crimson Gold that deserves applause.
-
60Though it unfolds like a thriller, it's ultimately a tragedy.
-
60Watching it is like getting a peek behind the curtain. But it's frustrating, too, because the casting of Emadeddin as a murderer-in-the-making precludes any psychological depth. And as an indictment of social inequality, which is the film's calling card, Panahi inadvertantly makes a far better case for the haves than for the have-nots.