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Crimson Gold
Wellspring Media
FILM:
MPAA RATING: Not Rated
Starring
Hossain Emadeddin,
Pourang Nakhael,
Azita Rayeji,
Kamyar Sheisi,
and
Shahram Vaziri
A murder and a suicide occur early one morning in a jewelry store. Behind this headline lies the story of a desperate man's feelings of humiliation in a world of social injustice.
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
Foreign
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Abbas Kiarostami
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Jafar Panahi
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: July 20, 2004
Video: July 20, 2004
Theatrical: January 16, 2003
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
97 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
Iran |
| LANGUAGE(S): |
Farsi (with English subtitles) |
Original title "Talaye sorgh"; Best Film, 2003 Chicago International Film Festival
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
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
David Sterritt
It's a troubling, courageous, compulsively watchable work of art.
100
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.
100
San Francisco Chronicle
Jonathan Curiel
An engrossing tale of class differences that reveals tiny details of one man’s descent into hell.
90
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
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
Jonathan Rosenbaum
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
Michael O'Sullivan
An extraordinary film in many ways, the least of which is its unorthodox casting.
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Liam Lacey
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
Lawrence Toppman
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
Michael Wilmington
A stark, minimalist near-masterpiece about the creation of a murderer in modern Iran.
83
Portland Oregonian
Marc Mohan
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
Scott Foundas
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
Desson Thomson
Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.
80
Los Angeles Times
Manohla Dargis
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
Lisa Nesselson
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
Jami Bernard
Another excellent example of how Iranian cinema uses deceptively simple techniques to decode devastating truths about human nature.
75
New York Post
Jonathan Foreman
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
Roger Ebert
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
Dana Stevens
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
Anthony Lane
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
Gregory Weinkauf
Not a great film, but a good one.
67
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
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
Chris Kaltenbach
There's a subtlety to Crimson Gold that deserves applause.
60
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
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.
 The average user rating for this movie is 7.2 (out of 10) based on 4 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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