Iranian cinema earned global attention through its poetic realism and moral rigour, with directors like Asghar Farhadi turning domestic dramas such as A Separation into international award winners. The tradition runs deeper still, from Forugh Farrokhzad's stark documentary The House Is Black to the quiet intensity of contemporary social films. Browse Macca's Iranian reviews below.
Rating: 3.5★
Osama arrived in 2003 as a genuinely singular piece of cinema: the first film to be shot entirely in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. That fact alone gives it a peculiar, almost documentary weight before a single frame has played. The Taliban had effectively abolished cinema in
Rating: 4.0★
Released in 2004, Turtles Can Fly arrived at a moment when the dust from the 2003 invasion of Iraq had barely begun to settle. Shot on location in the Kurdish regions of Iran and Iraq, the film plants itself on the Turkey-Iraq border in the days just before the
Rating: 3.5★
Jafar Panahi has spent much of the last fifteen years making films under conditions that would stop most directors outright. Arrested in 2010, banned from filmmaking and from leaving Iran, he has continued to work anyway, producing features on the quiet and smuggling them out to festival circuits while the
Rating: 4.0★
Iran in the mid-1970s was a pressure cooker, and for many young men caught up in the revolutionary fervour of the time, political violence felt less like a choice and more like an inevitability. Mohsen Makhmalbaf was one of those young men. In 1974, aged seventeen, he attacked a
Rating: 4.0★
To mark the centenary of cinema, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf placed a simple newspaper advertisement in Tehran in 1994, calling for anyone who wanted to appear in his next film to show up at a given time and place. He expected perhaps a few dozen people. Roughly three thousand turned
1980s
Abbas Kiarostami is one of those filmmakers whose reputation tends to precede him in a slightly intimidating way. Celebrated across European festival circuits and academic film culture from the late 1980s onward, the Iranian director built a body of work that consistently turned modest, everyday subjects into something that critics
Genre Documentary
★★★ — The House Is Black (1963)
Genre Drama
★★★½ — The Salesman (2016)
Genre Drama
★★★★ — A Separation (2011)
Genre Romance
★★½ — A Few Cubic Meters of Love (2014)
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
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