Critics reviews

Kiarostami chooses to focus on only a handful of individuals, relegating a majority of his sometimes vital characters to off-screen voices. In fact, the most important information in the film is almost always approached from discrete angles, if not simply elided entirely. We never see, for instance, the other two members of the production crew, though we hear them in conversation throughout. Not even the ailing old woman is seen or heard, taking on instead a kind of spectral role...

This is a deeply, patiently observational film, and the details Kiarostami emphasizes — a dung beetle struggling to haul away its bounty, an apple rolling haphazardly across an uneven floor, a bone floating down a stream — seem somehow profound in their banality, a mystery of ineffable beauty.

One of the masters of the modern cinema, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, combines a patient and loving attention to characters drawn from daily life and to their landscapes with a precise, canny, and fierce distillation of concrete phenomena into brilliant, vertiginous, and liberating abstractions.

The Wind Will Carry Us sustains an organic relationship between the film's form and its content. Indeed, this is the very significance of Kiarostami's film: it connotes a reconstitution of the medium according to the particular meaning its maker is attempting to convey.

Abbas Kiarostami presents an understated, honest, and introspective glimpse into the quiet dignity and celebration of everyday life in The Wind Will Carry Us.

This ambiguous comic masterpiece could be Abbas Kiarostami's greatest film to date; it's undoubtedly his richest and most challenging.

For all the self-important claims certain experts have made on Kiarostami's behalf, his films are anything but pompous. Typically understated, The Wind Will Carry Usis less amusing than bemusing. Kiarostami's sense of humor feels as dry as the countryside he depicts; the film is in many regards a comedy. The timing is impeccable, the dialogue borderline absurd.

Maybe that's just me...but I can't imagine that I'll be the only one frustrated by Kiarostami's increasing indulgence of a phenomenon that I once referred to as "equivocation overload"; I'm generally in favor of movies that gradually and tantalizingly parcel out key info, but when the picture actually ends and I'm still not sure what the hell was going on -- in this case, who the main character is and what exactly he's doing in this village -- the whole affair starts to seem unnecessarily coy.