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.
Country Romania
Between Revolutions is a genuinely powerful and intelligent piece of work, and one I admired more than I was always able to lose myself in. Vlad Petri's documentary is a quietly ambitious thing: a history of two uprisings, the Iranian revolution against the Shah and the Romanian revolution
Country Iran
A Bit of Light is Iranian cinema in its most recognisable register: sombre, calm, atmospheric, and quietly political. Ali Asgari's drama is a restrained, well-acted piece about a man at the end of his tether, and while I admired its control and its performances, its studied emotional
Article
If you ask me where the best cinema on Earth is being made, Iran is always somewhere near the top of my answer. For decades now, often working under censorship, travel bans and the constant threat of arrest, Iranian film-makers have produced some of the most humane, morally searching
Country Iran
There is a haunting doubling at the heart of The Friend's House Is Here. It is a film about young artists forced to make their work in secret, and it was itself made in secret, shot on the streets of Tehran under the nose of a regime that
Rating: 3.5★
There is a nine-year-old girl in the first story of The Day I Became a Woman who has until noon. That is her deadline. Once the sun hits its highest point on her birthday, she will officially be a woman, and she will never be allowed to play
Rating: 1.0★
A film called Five Dedicated to Ozu invites you, right there in the title, to think of one of cinema's great masters of stillness and quiet contemplation. It is a bold invocation. It is also, I'm sorry to say, one this film has absolutely no business
Rating: 3.5★
The story behind This Is Not a Film is almost more extraordinary than anything within it. In 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was handed a six-year prison sentence and a staggering twenty-year ban on making films, for the crime of supporting the opposition during Iran's
Rating: 3.5★
We are absolutely saturated with cinema set in Afghanistan. From the Soviet invasion to the endless, grinding War on Terror, the country has frequently served as a backdrop for foreign filmmakers looking to capture geopolitical conflict. There is something almost reflexive about it now, the way Western productions reach for
Rating: 4.0★
One of the most devastating pieces of cinema I have ever experienced. That is not hyperbole, and I want to be upfront about that before we go any further. Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly is the kind of film that sits in your chest long after the credits
Rating: 3.5★
There's a moment early in It Was Just an Accident where you catch yourself laughing, and then almost immediately feel guilty for it. That tonal shift, from dry, deadpan comedy to something far darker and more suffocating, is exactly what Jafar Panahi pulls off in his 2025 film,
Rating: 4.0★
That final frame. I'm not going to describe it, I'm not going to hint at it, I'm just going to tell you that it stopped me cold. In a single, perfectly held image, A Moment of Innocence earns everything that came before it, including
Raindance Film Festival
There is a strain of Iranian cinema that loves to point the camera at itself, to sit an actor in a chair, ask them to perform, and watch the truth leak out around the edges of the fiction. Mehrnoush Alia's debut feature 1001 Frames belongs firmly to that
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free