Variety by Deborah Young

Few Iranian films have tried to realistically depict both the urban middle and lower classes, and fewer still with the complexity of story telling and depth of characterization in Asghar Farhadi’s impressive third feature, Fireworks Wednesday.

Consequence by Blake Goble

The film possesses a quiet, considered tension that draws the viewer in.

Entertainment Weekly by Chris Nashawaty

Farhadi’s intrigue doesn’t feel like the stuff of a Hollywood thriller. It’s more realistic, more pedestrian than that – which gives it a real ring of low-key emotional truth.

Village Voice

It proves to be not just interesting in how it foreshadows the filmmaker's more mature works, but also a gripping piece of storytelling in its own right.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

What pulls us into Fireworks Wednesday is the universality of the emotions its characters display and the familiarity of the situations they find themselves in. Farhadi is a master navigator of these waters, and even his earlier films reward our close attention.

Village Voice by Kenji Fujishima

It proves to be not just interesting in how it foreshadows the filmmaker's more mature works, but also a gripping piece of storytelling in its own right.

RogerEbert.com by Godfrey Cheshire

As [Farhadi] does to such masterful effect in “A Separation,” here he constructs a story that keeps revealing new thematic and psychological layers, ones that often come to light through the shifting of perspective from one character to another, a technique that deepens our sympathy for the people we’re watching to the point of our realizing that, as in Renoir, “everyone has their reasons.”

Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard

Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

Much of the action takes place in the couple's haphazard apartment, but the movie really does feel like a movie, with Farhadi's camera unobtrusively energizing the close-quarters exchanges, both verbal and non-verbal. The acting is splendid.

Boston Globe by Peter Keough

Another complex and magnificently acted melodrama.

The Seattle Times by John Hartl

Much of this is funny, some of it is scary and a lot of it is as twisty as a mystery thriller. Very little of it, thanks to a superb cast, is predictable.

The A.V. Club by A.A. Dowd

Fireworks Wednesday carefully, organically introduces its characters, then lets the audience try to discern what they’re withholding.

CineVue by Patrick Gamble

As with all of Farhadi's films there's a frailty behind his characters, with their insecurities and moral dilemmas bubbling to the surface as the director slowly raises the temperature in this pressure cooker of domestic strife. Nervous editing and sinuous cinematography also give the impression that Farhadi is choreographing his stars rather than directing them.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

As with Mr. Farhadi’s other films, every detail of speech and body language resonates.

The Guardian by Paul MacInnes

This is a thoroughly engrossing and densely textured drama, showing Farhadi's cool skill in dissecting the Iranian middle classes and the unhappiness of marriage.

New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme

Farhadi brings keen discernment to this unraveling marriage, and a third-act revelation packs a wallop.

Time Out by Ben Kenigsberg

[Farhadi and cowriter Mani Haghighi] prove to be stronger on atmosphere than on structure, aided by crisp, unnerving camerawork.