Critics reviews

Every bit as richly complex and slyly self-aware as the more widely celebrated (in the West) films of Abbas Kiarostami, A Moment of Innocence is a dizzying hybrid of autobiography and mythology, in which Makhmalbaf takes the worst moment of his life and boldly reimagines it as a testament to our innate decency and capacity for love. If the final freeze-frame doesn't swell your heart to bursting, consider an emergency cardiogram.

In his most complex yet airiest film, Makhmalbaf’s fatalistic fervor is tempered with Kiarostamian delicacy and the labyrinthine yoke becomes light as cotton.

“To recapture my youth with the camera,” Makhmalbaf tells us. But the camera lies. And Makhmalbaf wants us to know that it lies, and to implicate himself in the act of lying. The attentive viewer realizes early on that the documentary feel of the film is a façade.

In many ways the paradigmatic work in the Iranian-new-wave Godardian-knot filmography, this unceremonious, 1996 hall of mirrors by Mohsen Makhmalbaf sticks like a koan-burr to your frontal lobe.

Though never totally regulated in style or mood, A Moment of Innocence still manages to communicate a palpably physical sense of its wintry environment, while also exploring the city of Tehran through its characters who travel down lanes or are shot in long take through the wind-screens of cars.

Though its methods lie somewhere between Pirandello and Rashomon, A Moment Of Innocence adds a personal dimension that's uniquely its own, as Makhmalbaf's investigation into the past evolves into a touching act of contrition.

Rather than using surrealism for spectacle's sake, the way Fellini sometimes did, Makhmalbaf sees audiovisual magic as an alloy, which stretches the bounds of the naturalism he is using in the name of a purely sensory experience.

This is one of the best features (1996) of the prolific and unpredictable Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf... This is no mere imitation [of Close-Up]; it's a fascinating humanist experiment and investigation in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery.