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Iran, France · 2002
1h 34m
Director Abbas Kiarostami
Starring Mania Akbari, Amin Maher, Kamran Adl, Roya Arabshahi
Genre Drama
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A young female driver in Tehran has ten conversations while picking up passengers and hitchhikers. The women she meets have varied lives--there is a jilted bride, a prostitute, and a woman on her way to prayer, among other--but all of their conversations give voice to the many underrepresented woman in Iran.
The ultimate lesson in less-is-more cinema, an intimate and revelatory character study as well as a brilliant, almost symphonic rendering of the distracted, anxious, half-alienated and half-meditative state in which we spend vast amounts of our lives.
Washington Post by Ann Hornaday
Kiarostami has been hailed as the premier humanist filmmaker at work in a larger Iranian cinematic renaissance, and all his formal signatures are on view here -- the small, intimate canvas, the loose, improvised air of the performances, the absence of an authoritarian directorial hand.
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
A work of inspired simplicity.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Iran's greatest filmmaker is fond of stripping personalities bare through conversations they have while riding in cars. Here he pushes his favorite dramatic device to its limit.
10 dazzling and perceptive snapshots of women with which femmes everywhere can identify.
New York Daily News by Jami Bernard
The already minimalist filmmaker has gone positively threadbare with Ten, a movie that feels as if there was no director on the set. For the most part, there wasn't.
San Francisco Chronicle by Jonathan Curiel
A minimalist film, Ten looks and feels like a documentary. At the end, there is no big denouement, but a profound realization that the people we see on camera are all aching for answers -- and struggling to come to terms with their lives.
Nobody handles unvarnished interactions quite the way Kiarostami does, and for much of Ten, it's a kind of austere thrill to watch him focus so intently on one aspect of his craft.
Los Angeles Times by Manohla Dargis
One of the best films to open so far this year, but greeting each new work from a favored director as if it were equally brilliant can't be good for anyone, the director included.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Sean Axmaker
There's no doubt that Kiarostami is giving us a lesson in social politics, but the education lies in the mosaic pieced together from conversations and situations.
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