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50%
58%
74%
91%
Average Rating: 8.9/10
Reviews Counted: 142
Fresh: 141 | Rotten: 1
Morally complex, suspenseful, and consistently involving, A Separation captures the messiness of a dissolving relationship with keen insight and searing intensity.
Average Rating: 9.3/10
Critic Reviews: 38
Fresh: 38 | Rotten: 0
Morally complex, suspenseful, and consistently involving, A Separation captures the messiness of a dissolving relationship with keen insight and searing intensity.
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Average Rating: 4.4/5
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Set in contemporary Iran, A Separation is a compelling drama about the dissolution of a marriage. Simin wants to leave Iran with her husband Nader and daughter Termeh. Simin sues for divorce when Nader refuses to leave behind his Alzheimer-suffering father. Her request having failed, Simin returns to her parents' home, but Termeh decides to stay with Nader. When Nader hires a young woman to assist with his father in his wife's absence, he hopes that his life will return to a normal state.
Dec 30, 2011 Limited
Aug 21, 2012
$7.1M
Sony Pictures Classics
All Critics (143) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (143) | Rotten (1) | DVD (3)
Dynamically shot and paced like a thriller, the film has the density and moral prickliness of a good novel.
These people seem so real they might live next door. And they probably do.
Very few movies capture as convincingly as A Separation does the ways in which seemingly honorable decisions can lead to interpersonal conflict -- even disaster.
To say the piercing Iranian film A Separation is about divorce is a bit like saying The Wizard of Oz is about a pair of slippers.
"A Separation" moves beyond one couple's sundering marriage to reveal growing rifts between generations, ideologies, religious mind-sets, genders and classes in contemporary Iran.
"A Separation" is a 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.
A moral tale of immense depth and sophistication, Asghar Farhadi's rightly praised A Separation remains one of the most important films of the young decade to date.
[A] flawless domestic portrait.
... a complex and nuanced movie about the ... the collapse of a relationship between intelligent people of good will. It is heartbreaking and subtle, the sort of film that some folks say isn't made often or well enough by the usual Hollywood suspects.
A Separation infuses a great insight into modern Iran with a powerful insight into the human condition - this demonstrates the power and poetic potential of cinematic drama. It's a MUST see.
Writer-director Asghar Farhadi performs some kind of miracle with the tension and complexity he produces from such a simple set-up.
...riveting, enormously resonant and impressively acted...
Fahardi's accomplishment is to have brought to the screen a group of equally complex, equally flawed, and equally human characters whose only real problem is that they must live life with each other.
Offers an unwritten ending that must be decided by each viewer.
... subtlety and a sense of profound decency ...
A clever, insightful and heartfelt examination of human frailty that makes watching subtitles seem like a breeze.
It's fast paced, exciting, thrilling, edgy, moving, engaging, and - in its portrait of a justice system almost radically alien to the one I live under - absolutely fascinating.
Although the film might serve as a portrait of Iran's two conflicting social groups as reflected in the Green movement/Ahmadinejad clashes, it is much more about moral contradictions that any society has to face. A masterpiece.
It's the little moments in Farhadi's film that are its most important, speaking every bit as loudly as its big, narrative-driving moments.
If any one film can re-inject life into an entire national cinema, it's A Separation.
You may also find that some aspects of this very foreign story seem disturbingly not all that foreign.
An outsider could see these characters as misguided. That's not the reality however. Farhadi slips us into their shoes and we appreciate each of their perspectives.
Asghar Farhadi has written a superb screenplay and directs it with equal brilliance. He has managed to make a film that says something about the state of affairs in his Iran and weaves that message into an engrossing tapestry of mystery and drama.
The complex realities of human emotions and experience are more than sufficient to carry a film, and Farhadi doesn't let fussy direction or attempts to be overly clever get in the way of letting this brilliant, quietly insightful story unfold.
A mundane but extremely intricate story served with verosimilitud, humanism, tenderness and tension, poured on the screen as a reevaluation of everyone's actions and consequences. Marvelously acted. Nourishment for the soul.
July 6, 2012Super Reviewer
A Separation is a flawlessly directed ensemble piece. We're introduced to a family and their acquaintances. Usually a director's hand is apparent, guiding the viewer to a pre-ordained conclusion. In today's world where most stories dictate there must be a hero and a villain, writer-director Farhadi is a bit of a rebel.
August 6, 2011Super Reviewer
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