Critics reviews

Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is My Friend’s House?, the film sets a child’s pursuit of knowledge against a society that prohibits personal and artistic expression...

Allegorically or poetically, you can take the film purely on face value and be amazed by its own sense of beauty and its unconventional approach to normal cinematic principles.

A strange, elliptical film of haunting, limpid visual beauty... Only a fool could miss the social and political implications of such a film, and the government, not at all fooled in this regard, responded brusquely. The Silence was banned in Iran.

The Silence shares the striking visual beauty of Makhmalbaf’s earlier Gabbeh, although it’s often a beauty cut adrift from narrative meaning.

While it may be tempting to dismiss the film as strictly old hat, Makhmalbaf conjures a rapturously sensual world that's more original when experienced than when described.

[A] sensuous symphony of sound and color... The movie becomes more surreal as it goes along...

Lacking formal narrative, the film consists of a repetitive series of images as Makhmalbaf’s camera follows the young protagonist through his daily routine, a world that, despite the film’s title, is not a silent one... Even fans of Iranian cinema may find this a slight entry, one not destined to travel any further than the helmer’s name can take it.

This esoteric art movie from Makhmalbaf senior is visually arresting, I suppose, in the self-consciously poetic manner of Paradjanov, but only if you can look past the stultifyingly whimsical nature of its allegory.