Critic Rating
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Director
Asghar Farhadi
Cast
Leila Hatami,
Payman Maadi,
Shahab Hosseini,
Sareh Bayat,
Sarina Farhadi,
Babak Karimi
Genre
Drama
Simin wants to leave Iran to give her daughter, Termeh, a different kind of life outside the country. But Nader, Termeh’s father, refuses to leave his ailing father behind. Simin files for divorce, which Nader is willing to grant, but he’s unwilling to allow his daughter to emigrate. And these are only the beginning of the family’s moral quandaries.
A Separation is beautiful and heartbreaking. The film relies heavily on the script and performances to come off as natural and human. Asghar Farhadi succeeded in telling a story that is both intensely personal and universal. A Separation can be a tough watch at certain points, but the film will stay with you for a long time.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
The members of the cast represent ensemble, naturalistic acting at its finest.
USA Today by Claudia Puig
Sophisticated and universal yet deeply intimate, A Separation is an exquisitely conceived family drama that has the coiled power of a top-notch thriller.
The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias
Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.
IndieWire by Eric Kohn
It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.
Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf
The drama it might remind you most of, oddly enough, is "Six Degrees of Separation," also about the snowballing connections between unlikely people. And as in that urban clash, the bedrock of it all is social responsibility, ever crumbling and rebuilding. A total triumph.
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
A Separation is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised.
NPR by Bob Mondello
A film that captures the drama and suspense of real life as urgently as any picture released this year.
Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer
A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.
Salon by Andrew O'Hehir
Something close to a contemporary masterwork, and maybe the best foreign-language film of the year, right at the tail end.
Time by Richard Corliss
However ripe A Separation might seem for being adapted into a smart American film, Hollywood shouldn't bother. Farhadi's movie is just about perfect as it is.
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
A Separation is a landmark film. No way will you be able to get it out of your head.
Slant Magazine by Nick Schager
Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
It is a rigorously honest movie about the difficulties of being honest, a film that tries to be truthful about the slipperiness of truth.
New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier
Together and apart, Hatami and Maadi are magnetic. Hatami, a star in Iranian cinema, lets us see Simin's intelligence and defiant sense of self-worth often with nothing more than a gesture.
Village Voice by J. Hoberman
What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.
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