| 100 |
Village Voice
Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster--a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values.
|
| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
It's a troubling, courageous, compulsively watchable work of art.
|
| 100 |
Boston Globe
This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
An engrossing tale of class differences that reveals tiny details of one man’s descent into hell.
|
| 90 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Provides 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.
|
| 90 |
Chicago Reader
Kiarostami'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.
|
| 90 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Richard James Havis
A flawlessly executed character study.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
An extraordinary film in many ways, the least of which is its unorthodox casting.
|
| 88 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
As 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.
|
| 88 |
Charlotte Observer
It settles into the typical reflective mode of Iranian films, but something IS happening: A human being is slowly, sullenly, silently approaching his combustion point.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.
|
| 83 |
Portland Oregonian
As 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.
|
| 80 |
LA Weekly
The 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.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
Through 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."
|
| 80 |
Variety
Succeeds as a universal account of frustration applicable to any urban center where the gap between haves and have-nots is tauntingly visible.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
Another excellent example of how Iranian cinema uses deceptively simple techniques to decode devastating truths about human nature.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
Crimson 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.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
The success of Crimson Gold depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man.
|
| 70 |
The New York Times
The 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.
|
| 70 |
The New Yorker
Its 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]
|
| 70 |
Dallas Observer
Not a great film, but a good one.
|
| 67 |
Entertainment Weekly
A 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.
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
There's a subtlety to Crimson Gold that deserves applause.
|
| 60 |
New York Magazine
Watching 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.
|
| 60 |
TV Guide
Staff (Not Credited)
Though it unfolds like a thriller, it's ultimately a tragedy.
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