CineVue by Christopher Machell

Panahi’s courageousness as an agitator is matched only by his inventiveness as a filmmaker.

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

A complex work of novelistic density, this is among the boldest and most accomplished statements from one of the world’s exemplary filmmakers.

Washington Post by Ann Hornaday

No Bears would be thoroughly engaging simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some diverting film-within-a-film metatext thrown in for thoughtful measure. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and merge, his deeper observations come into sobering and ultimately deeply moving focus.

San Francisco Chronicle by Bob Strauss

Like all his films of the last dozen years, “No Bears” brims with paranoia and metaphors for the trouble Panahi’s pictures have gotten him into. This time, though, he implicates himself in a complex exploration of how his work can exploit and even exacerbate the real-life tragedies it’s always so powerfully depicted.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Bilge Ebiri

While No Bears is profoundly powerful in its own right, the knowledge that its maker is incarcerated gives its explorations of exile, truth, and freedom a throat-catching urgency.

Rolling Stone by David Fear

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch when you remember that the man driving away from the scene of the crime onscreen isn’t able to go anywhere once that screen fades to black.

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

No Bears is a picture that’s in keeping with his recent work—circumstances deemed that it just had to be—but one that breaks away from it in ways that yield a work of, yes, astonishment.

The Playlist by Elena Lazic

Panahi does not paint himself and his practice in a kind or perfectly innocent light here. However, his ability to still clearly identify who the real culprits are is an inspiring testament to his clear-mindedness and his unshaken ability to imagine a better, more just world.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.

Original-Cin by Liam Lacey

At times, No Bears can come across as frustratingly convoluted, but Panahi is an artful filmmaker, who surprises us by breaking the rhythms of the film with disruptions, confrontations, and plot twists.

TheWrap by Ben Croll

If Panahi makes us understand Jafar, he also recognizes the rippling effect of his choices. Such is the dense and intricate layering of this deceptively simple film, which has a no-budget aesthetic and a novelistic sprawl.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

Panahi’s stoical presence at the center of all this is rattled, forcing him to contemplate the repercussions of his work both to himself and to even his most guileless collaborators. The sobering final image resonates with the unspoken cry of an artist exiled in his own homeland, saying, “Enough.”

The Film Stage by David Katz

The director’s bravery and ingenuity—by continuing to create new work, advocate for himself, and also entertain us—remains an utterly inspiring thing.

IndieWire by Sophie Monks Kaufman

Panahi is a director who has always mingled fact and fiction, and here the distinction is more addled than ever, so that by the time the final credits roll it’s not exactly clear what was staged and what was real.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Like Panahi’s recent films This Is Not a Film and Taxi Tehran, this is powerful because of its control, subtlety and diplomatic finesse.

Time Out

Legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi (Closed Curtain, Taxi Tehran) explores ideas of freedom, and what they mean to two very different couples in No Bears, his latest film about life in the homeland that currently has him cruelly incarcerated.

Variety by Jessica Kiang

If Panahi’s dissident films have to date been journeys of discovery about the subversively liberating, life-affirming power of cinema, No Bears is where he slams on the brakes.

Slant Magazine by Sam C. Mac

No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.