A Separation: Critic Reviews

The film wraps us, with stunning directness, in the complex folds of its characters' passions.

It is a rigorously honest movie about the difficulties of being honest, a film that tries to be truthful about the slipperiness of truth.

With great power and subtlety, Farhadi transforms this ugly quarrel into a contemporary tragedy.

Sophisticated and universal yet deeply intimate, A Separation is an exquisitely conceived family drama that has the coiled power of a top-notch thriller.

This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation.

What's fascinating is how the various issues -- religious or practical -- are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.

Together and apart, Hatami and Maadi are magnetic.

"A Separation" could hardly be more concrete, or contemporary, or dramatic.

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.

Very few movies capture as convincingly as A Separation does the ways in which seemingly honorable decisions can lead to interpersonal conflict -- even disaster.

...interesting, and engaging, in both a storytelling and sociological/cultural study fashion.

What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem.

The miracle of A Separation is that it doesn't spare any of its characters, nor does it seek to indict them. It is a democratic portrait of a theocratic world.

The film involves its audience in an unusually direct way, because although we can see the logic of everyone's position, our emotions often disagree.

Some films wear their artistry so lightly they appear simply to be happening, the inner workings of the story guided by an unseen hand.

This is primarily a human story about a marriage unraveling, the husband torn between love for his daughter and devotion to his father, the daughter torn between one parent and the other.

It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.

"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.

These people seem so real they might live next door. And they probably do.

"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.

Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging.

A downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions.

Rashomon-like in its perceptual complexities, truth vs. belief, Asghar Farhadi's drama forces us to constantly shift our assessments and allegiances.

Crafts a minefield out of the mundane and may very well be a masterpiece for it.

Farhadi's true focus is the flawed capacity for any law -- any form of cold rationality, period -- to address the slippery nature of human affairs. It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.