Recensioni de* critic*

Farhadi’s magnum opus, a sui generis in his oeuvre, Iranian cinema, and indeed within the larger history of cinema itself.

Because certain salient aspects of its narrative relate. . . to the nuances of the country's legal system, it's perhaps a given that the film is shaped at least in part by its setting. But defining A Separation exclusively by its national origins is a mistake: It means adopting a myopic Western perspective, a privileged viewpoint from which anything foreign becomes irrevocably colored by its perceived Otherness.

Every once in a while, these characters seem to crash against each other, and the film explodes along with them -- gaining urgency, power, danger as it moves relentlessly along, never quite allowing you to see where it might go next.

It serves as a quiet reminder of how good it’s possible for movies to be. You don’t always have to sacrifice complexity for suspense, or formal sophistication for visceral power. It’s possible, if rare, to come across a movie that has it all.

It's a deceptive, Hitchcockian mystery whose clues are laid out so carefully you'll probably miss them, and a complex philosophical fable in which every character is morally compromised.

It’s a fearsomely effective film; I kept thinking of The Social Network, with which it shares nothing but the ability to make two hours of muddled conflict among equally off-putting people riveting through sheer propulsive momentum.

Somehow it is all perfectly clear, and yet at the same time tantalizingly and heartbreakingly mysterious.

Farhadi explores this situation from myriad angles, but lands again on a simple, perfect final shot that throws the true cost of this conflict into focus.

Apart from the deliberate framing of these shots—which also serve to frame the story within the legal and cultural forces of Iranian society—the camerawork is admirably self-effacing. Even its moves and plays with focus in the confined spaces of the couples’ apartments and government offices are attuned to character behavior—open to the discoveries of the moment rather than staged as moral commentary.