Author: jonathankiefer

It seems like a fine idea to put Joss Whedon in charge of Marvel’s The Avengers. Given his knack for wisecracking-ensemble revitalizations of chancy entertainment properties (there was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and then there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Whedon’s superhero summit, adapted by him and Zak Penn from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s comics, might well be the ultimate Marvel.

Less so is it a marvel, ultimately. Culled from their respective blockbusters, clad in flashy costumes and CGI, Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor (respectively Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Hemsworth) have come together at last. As established by covert military administrator Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson), their ranks also include the archer Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the martial artist Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), who haven’t yet had movies of their own and don’t seem to need them.

So this amounts to an enormous, expensive juggling act. Contractually obliged to proceed from one set-piece to the next, The Avengers gathers at least enough momentum to not seem as long as it is. But it works best in the downtime, when we just seem to be hanging out backstage with some sort of action-figure supergroup. It’s sweet to see these characters treated with teasing reverence, as if little individual rituals of gentle ridicule can redeem the sheer silliness of posing them together.

Obviously Whedon wanted our heroes’ essential infighting, be it verbal or forest-flatteningly physical, to seem more personal than a mere din of clanging metallic collisions. Accordingly the best internal-battle scene involves Ruffalo’s scientist wringing his hands over that innate Hulkdom, which he says once left him desperate enough to put a bullet in his mouth—but “the other guy spat it out.” Clever strategy there: Tell, don’t show. Other Whedonisms include redemptive self-sacrifice as grand thematic theory and regrettable supporting-player sacrifice as operative practice. But he does understand that at the core of superhero mythology is the possibility of transcendence, even if it’s just an aircraft carrier managing to become an aircraft.

For the humans, reconciliation requires an external enemy, and our villain this evening will be Thor’s brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), an arrogant extraterrestrial Viking with one of those bullies-are-secretly-insecure personalities and the sort of fascist urge that really gets Captain America’s goat. When Loki summons a war-mongering horde through a hole in the sky, the Avengers get to work dispatching disposable baddies as if from some technically sophisticated yet narratively forsaken video game. These invaders make more of a mess than a threat, but at least we can tell what’s going on: the climax.

What’s most fun is Loki’s suggestion to a throng of kneeling civilians that they’d be happier in supplication anyway. Might that also be aimed at hardcore fans of movies made from comics? As the T-shirt says, “Joss Whedon Is My Master Now.”

At first glance, I gleaned from an e-mail subject line only that it was a movie and that it was called Marley. I drew a breath, made a face. One more treacle bomb from the John Grogan empire of dog-divined sentimental bestsellers?

In other words it didn’t occur to me, at first glance, what a film called Marley might actually be about. I confess this as an amends-making, and to take proper cultural stock of what that name ought to mean to us now. How shameful of me to forget that somewhere between the fettered ghost of Scrooge’s partner and the adorably incorrigible labrador retriever, there was also, um, yes, a certain reggae legend.

Apparently Bob Marley’s life has somehow gone without a definitive motion-picture survey, and this documentary from Kevin Macdonald, who also made Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, will do fine until one arrives. Reportedly Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme both came and went from this project, which had full support from Marley’s estate. Both of those directors have made great movies about musicians before, and either of them might have done something wonderful here. Macdonald’s salvage has a vaguely discernible bronze-medal aspect, but it does Marley’s legacy a great service if only by not taking the form of a trite fictional biopic.

“The third world’s first pop superstar” is what Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner called Marley on the occasion of the latter’s posthumous introduction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Marley elaborates, crawling chronologically through the man’s life history and collecting observations from many who knew him. These vary widely, insight-wise. Son Ziggy and daughter Cedella, two of the 11 children Marley had from seven different relationships, say much, even without words. Wife Rita dignifiedly maintains perspective on the relationships. Fellow musicians improvise their own off-beat chiming in.

To the question of how it went from just The Wailers to Bob Marley and the Wailers, Macdonald mostly implies his answer: How could it not? There is the unfakeable charisma with which, among other feats of populism, Marley once brought a pair of feuding Jamaican politicians on stage with him and got them to hold hands. This may not sound like much, but Jamaican political feuds of that era were ominously violent. In another episode, Marley himself even took a bullet. Then he got back on stage and showed his scar to the worshipful crowd. Yes, he was more driven than the haze of Rastafarian relaxations might suggest.
Compelling even at its most platitudinous, Marley has the full texture of appreciation.

Macdonald does the important thing of getting a groove going. It’s heartening to hear the often gorgeous music returned to its roots and redeemed from the ironic anti-ghetto of Hacky Sack-infested college quadrangles that sprang up after the poverty-born cultural emissary died too young from cancer in 1981. Unfortunately it’ll still take more than just this movie to get past mistaking him, at least at first glance, for some beloved lamented pet.

Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Kid With A Bike stars Thomas Doret and Cécile De France in search of a heartful home. (Sundance Selects)

Sibling Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne bring their customary immediacy and unsentimental compassion to this naturalistic fable of an innocently furious at-risk kid (Thomas Doret) who finds himself abandoned by his dad (Jérémie Renier) and taken in, practically at random, by a surrogate mom (Cécile De France). This lithe and solemnly kinetic little, blond boy-hero seems like an obverse of Spielberg’s depthless Tintin; his story is conveyed through riveting decisive moments of indignant determination, guileless self-deception, and touchingly credible moral reckoning.

Where’s his actual mother? Don’t know. Why’s his father such a deadbeat? Not sure. “Seeing him stresses me out,” he says of the boy. Renier(a Dardenne regular) also played a guy who sold his infant to the black market in their film L’Enfant; he’s weirdly good at this. And what motivates the adopting angel? Well, here’s where it gets interesting—maybe she’s just a decent person? To suggest as much without getting all smug and treacly about it, and without ruining the viewer’s good faith, is a lot harder than it may sound. Even Sandra Bullock probably would say so.

De France holds the movie together without taking it over. It’s still about the kid—and of course his bike, which, like his father, keeps getting away from him. The point is his refusal to let go, and how to accommodate it. It’s actually his idea for the woman to take him in: Having fled his state-run group home, chased by counselors into a clinic waiting room where she just happens to be, he grabs her impulsively, clinging as if to his own life. “You can hold me,” she says, “but not so tight.” Later, an aggravated lover tells her it’s me or him, and her revelatory response is another of the movie’s well-played, miraculously subtle turning points. One more is the development by which a local hoodlum (Egon Di Mateo) admires the kid’s tenacity and grooms him as a petty criminal. No, that doesn’t go well.

I should note that I have a good friend who got fed up with this movie, fast. He couldn’t stand the kid—all that lashing out —and kept wanting to smack him. I advised my friend never to see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, although maybe he should for a contrasting example, and advised myself never to hire him as a babysitter.

It takes real power to polarize an audience, especially without seeming to try. The magic of the Dardennes’ frugal style is an apparent detachment that gradually reveals itself as complete commitment. Long, nonchalantly attentive takes, punctuated only by a few choice bits of Beethoven, allow for great clarity of human expression. This all rather unabashedly suggests the influence of Robert Bresson, and a death-and-resurrection motif only reinforces that quasi-religious Bressonian exaltation. But The Kid with a Bike is too directly articulated and too contemporary to seem derivative. And transcending ancestral inheritance, after all, is what it’s about.

One reason it’s so hard to get a table at Sukiyabashi Jiro, the unprepossessing sushi restaurant wedged beneath an office building just next to a Tokyo subway station, is that the place doesn’t actually have any tables. It’s just one narrow counter and 10 seats. Another reason is a three-star rating from the Michelin Guide, which means it’s officially worth traveling to Japan from wherever you are just to eat there.

Cleverly, filmmaker David Gelb got in by making a documentary about the proprietor. Jiro Ono is widely reported to be the world’s best sushi chef, and as Jiro Dreams of Sushi reveals, he sets an elegant if also daunting example of devotion to his work. The title of Gelb’s reverie does not exaggerate. “I would jump out of bed at night with ideas,” recalls the 85-year-old master, whose lifelong meditation on those ideas is the substance of this film.

The first question: “What defines deliciousness?” Gelb proceeds to elegantly establish the necessary conditions for devising an answer. Between glistening fish flesh close-ups come glimpses of family history, supplier subcultures, and other useful bits of context, but the prevailing aesthetic is a sort of artful, slow-motion austerity. If Gelb’s reverential gestures become repetitive, it’s at least partly to establish character essentials. We learn early on that Jiro gets on the subway from the same place on the same platform every day; it becomes clear, and crucial, that the restaurant’s asceticism extends directly from the man himself.
The glory of Jiro Dreams of Sushi is that it doesn’t just make you want to eat. It makes you want to be great at making something. To be a shokunin, a sort of socially responsible and spiritually resolute artisan, requires patience and pride. Other trade secrets include 45-minute octopus massage, avoidance of appetizers, and carefully pressurized body temperature rice. (It should be common knowledge, meanwhile, that umami is a harmony of flavors, and a feeling that makes you say “ahh.”)

Also, his staff’s apprenticeship is long and strenuous. One subordinate reports needing more than 200 tries to grill an egg custard that meets Jiro’s standards. His older son, still an apprentice at age 50, works by Jiro’s side and is evidently in his shadow. Across town his younger son runs another sushi restaurant, known for a more relaxed atmosphere by customers who tend to get nervous eating in front of Jiro. It’s true: He hovers. Even one eloquently effusive food writer admits to getting nervous with every visit. What’s more, the son who left was informed by his father upon departure that he’d have no home to return to. Eschewing failure is how Jiro encourages success.

This is the consequence of pleasure taken seriously. And it is the shape of a legacy. By now his reputation has been earned; it seems likely that sushi dreams of Jiro.

It’s a little unnerving how the American Pie movies are starting to add up to some kind of national sociology. With the latest, American Reunion, exuding a relaxed sense of duty, the whole franchise seems like the adolescent sex-farce equivalent of Michael Apted’s Up series of documentaries, in which, since age 7, the same group of kids has been visited by a film crew every seven years. Presumably in both cases this will continue until they’re all dead, as well as the rest of us.

So, not that you asked, but here’s what’s going on with the class of ’99. The hapless Jim (Jason Biggs) and horny Michelle (Alyson Hannigan), parents to a toddler now, are cordially married but sexually disconnected. Sweet beefcake Oz (Chris Klein) settled into sub-ESPN sportscasting after losing a TV dance contest. Non-entity Kevin (Thomas Ian Nichols) compensates for “Real Housewives” date nights with a gently manicured beard. Pseudo-sophisticate Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) has fashioned himself as a bohemian drifter, and rude-boy Stifler (Seann William Scott), now with the shit-eating grin wiped from face, grumbles his way through corporate-temp subservience.

Collectively they yearn for regression, and so, on the occasion of a 13th high school reunion, they return to their shared adolescent idyll of suburban Michigan, where life was so raunchy and so sweet. The premise of this fourth piece of Pie (not counting however many slices have gone straight to DVD) suits its franchise-wide proclivity: getting sentimental about the shame-based comedy of crude bodily functions. Magnanimously not possessive of the market they’d once cornered, the lads indulge another round of untoward yet healing high jinks —penile indignity here, beer-cooler bowel movement there—plus the occasional telegraph flash of This Is a Reference to the Previous Films. At least some water under the bridge makes their friendship more plausible.

As ensemble vehicles, reunion movies can be hard to steer. Writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg labor over a lot of set-up, a lot of wrap-up, and some perfunctory in-between bits to tie it all (very loosely) together. It takes too long to set the table for tasty bonbons like Stifler’s rattling discovery that half his lacrosse team was gay (“I thought they were wrestling,” he whimpers), or the latest awkward talk between Jim and his dad (the ever-game Eugene Levy). Ali Cobrin is necessarily appealing as the grown-up girl next door whom Jim used to babysit, now suddenly a naked drunken flirt, but overall the movie could be kinder to her. As it could to Mena Suvari and Tara Reid, who appear merely blonde and hard to tell apart.

Being so focused on shoehorning sequel-mandated shtick into the latest life-stage anxiety, American Reunion seems at times strangely humorless. Audience willing, it becomes funny almost in spite of itself, and therefore at least gives off a minor cathartic charge. So it goes with millennial nostalgia: Sometimes it’s easier said than done to really keep in touch.

1. It was kind of a thing once, and that was only in 2D!
Exactly how did an adolescent love story set in 1912 on a famously ill-fated luxury ocean liner become the biggest box-office grosser ever, at least until a later movie about alien rainforest super-Smurfs came along from the same director? No one really knows, but now you can pay extra for another, deeper look. And didn’t you always wish you could have sailed on the Titanic? (Well, except for that last part.)

2. It’s a period piece—from the future!
Just as Titanic the boat may seem a relic from an earlier era, so does Titanic the movie. But that wily James Cameron—ocean enthusiast, old-fashioned Hollywood showman, stager of spectacles, and tacky Oscar speech quoter of his own mediocre dialogue—always has known a thing or two about human destiny. Even in 1997 he foresaw how 21st century audiences would want to be entertained: by wasting many hours staring at a screen, envying other people’s make-believe status, and witnessing an EPIC FAIL. It’s only just now that 3D technology has at last caught up with this visionary.

3. You missed it the first time!
Well, it’s possible. All of us were busy in the ’90s. Younger, fresher, more willing to go out and try new things. (There wasn’t really much Internet to speak of then.) Maybe you had other stuff going on, and just never got around to it. Or maybe you gave Titanic a pass because you knew how it ends. Well, you still know how it ends. Or do you? Stay past the credits for a surprise. No, just kidding. Same deal: It sinks, he dies, her heart goes on. Look, it’s about the journey.

4. Now with even more morbid curiosity!
Actually, the poignancy of retrospect always was a big part of this movie’s appeal. Now it has more. Ah, to think of a time when Kate Winslet didn’t try so hard and Leonardo DiCaprio still did. They were so impossibly young then, before the body image issues and the coke-bloat, respectively, just the wistful beauty from Heavenly Creatures and the Future Great Actor who’d outgrown “Growing Pains” together in the salty breeze, surfing that tsunami of Celine Dion. So poignant it makes you a little seasick.

5. It’s time to send those Hollywood fat cats a message regarding the shameless commerce of 3D-retrofitted former blockbusters!
No, this is not some adorable little scrap-opus in need of IndieGoGo funding. And indeed not many of us can afford to have submarines custom made for ourselves in order to visit the ocean floor just in time for the re-release of an already ludicrously profitable movie we made 15 years ago, but apparently it’s either this or the Star Wars prequels. Well played, Cameron. 

Odds are, by the time you read this, you’ll already have seen it. Possibly more than once. So let’s discuss. How about those Hunger Games, huh?!

Speaking of odds, let’s speak of odds, as they often do in The Hunger Games. “May the odds be ever in your favor,” they say. Of course, if you’re playing, the odds are never in your favor. They’re 23 to 1 that you’ll die. Murder, starvation, exposure—options do abound; it’s just that none of them are actually favorable. The only way to win is to not die. And to make sure everybody else does.

But you knew this. You knew this is what happens when pairs of adolescents from a dozen districts of some future former America, are chosen by annual lottery for a woodsy death match on live TV, which has been going on for nearly three quarters of a century now. You knew because you’ve read the first book of Suzanne Collins’ bestselling young adult sci-fi trilogy, and you’ve been waiting for the movie.

About which the best thing must be Jennifer Lawrence as its heroine, a coal miner’s daughter from District 12, where the fashion tends toward migrant-mother chic and folks glumly congregate like movie Jews en route to concentration camps. This sets them starkly apart from those foppish capital-city richies who sanction the mandatory bloodsport (and, what’s more insidious, the mandatory viewing thereof) as some twisted pillar of their decadent glam couture. Boilerplate dystopia plot aside—and the script, by Collins, Billy Ray, and director Gary Ross, has its own battles to fight against pseudo-suspense and other bloating filler—the most innocent and enduring pleasure of The Hunger Games is seeing Lawrence go so agilely through a progress of contexts in which she stands out.

It’s a great relief that she’s not just another scantily clad ass-kicker, nor a wispy nonentity torn between mythical monster men. (Although yes, a love triangle takes shape, with Josh Hutcherson as her closest opponent and Liam Hemsworth as her brooding back-home pal). Contrasting peripheral not-quite-characters played with brightly costumed monotony by Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, and Donald Sutherland, Lawrence brings a steady presence and enough unabashed vulnerability to plausibly survive the flamboyant savagery at hand.

This is partly a parable of show business, after all. Reportedly inspired by Collins’ experience of flipping channels between war coverage and reality TV, it seems appropriately more mind-numbing than groundbreaking or actively satirical. And there’s a sense of money having been siphoned from the special-effects budget into the marketing budget. But fair enough—as you know, it is important for young people to have pop -cultural touchstones about which to feel possessive. The movie itself seems daunted by neither its provenance in Collins’ beloved books nor the precedents of its many similar ancestors. And isn’t that just the kind of fighting spirit you like to see?

As Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in Superbad reminded us, Hollywood has a long, goofy tradition of hiring post-teenaged actors to portray teenaged characters. Hill and Channing Tatum together in 21 Jump Street suggest a corollary tendency to make age-inappropriateness itself the center of our attention.

An irreverent movie comedy rehash of a premise taken way too seriously by late-1980s TV, it’s also a fun-house mirror for a deranged society in which the less you look like a teenager the more amusing it is to act like one. The question of how we got here has many answers, but one thing to remember about the late 1980s is that it was a time of just enough amiably hysterical anti-drug conservatism to posit the narc as ultimate bad-boy outsider. The premise that baby-faced cops go undercover in high schools, as mounted by a then-fledgling Fox network, somehow launched Johnny Depp’s career.

A hokey but untenable absurdity, in other words, and the new movie can’t resist playing it as such. This 21 Jump Street gets right to work, whisking its duo of rivals-cum-buds right along from high school to police academy to a genteel bike patrol, promptly botched, and then back to school, now preposterously undercover. There, armed with only a bond of mutual incompetence, they uncomfortably discover that recent pieties of political correctness have upended expected social codes. Thus Hill’s chubby sensitive thespian stands tall at last on the precipice of popularity, with Tatum’s blunt beefcake jock consigned to further schooling from a fringe of science geeks.

“Glee” is duly blamed, and the man-boys proceed with their mission particulars. These include negotiations with figures ranging from an angry foul-mouthed boss played by Ice Cube to a smarmy cool-kid drug dealer played by Dave Franco. The drug is synthetic, but its name, HolyF*ckingSh*t, seems wholly organic to users’ experiences.

21 Jump Street offers at least as much personality as should be expected from a film conceived by Hill, scripted by Michael Bacall, also of Project X and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Actually, the most appealing thing about it may be the sense of slapdash pluralism and conspiratorial abandon of Tatum wanting the world to know he’s actually sweet and fun and funny, and of Hill totally having his back.

These improbable cops don’t tell us much about modern law enforcement, but the film does imply a social contract of sorts. Somehow without falling apart entirely, 21 Jump Street combines flip vulgarity, daffy warmth, and antic wish fulfillment about revisable high-school history. Furthermore, it may be reported, without spoilage, that these filmmakers do their requisite-cameo duty stoutly. In sum, if that show could be said to deserve a movie, this one must be it.

 John Carter is from Virginia but he was in Arizona when he wound up on Mars. That was in 1868, but our tale, as unfurled in a 2012 film based on a 1912 story, begins in 1881. And he is its protagonist, although the account is relayed through his young nephew, who, with our disbelief kindly suspended, will grow up to become the prolific pulp fictioneer Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Meanwhile, Burroughs’ swashbuckling sci-fi serial will grow up to become a movie by Wall-E director Andrew Stanton, with writing help from super-powered novelist Michael Chabon, and starring “Friday Night Lights” heartthrob Taylor Kitsch. If John Carter feels ponderously tangled, derivative of Star Wars and Avatar and everything in between (an irony given source material without which those movies might not have existed) well, that’s what a century’s worth of development will do.

Carter is a former Confederate Army captain who finds himself teleported to the red planet, where lesser gravity lets him leap around like a superhero. How he breathes and keeps warm is not explained, but apparently there is an atmosphere on Mars, and it retains at least enough sunshine that a loincloth is all the outerwear one really needs.

Also, there are Martians. They aren’t little green men but big ones, tall and reedy, with four arms and facial tusks. With their brute exoticism and clannish codes of honor, they exude an old colonialist’s idea of noble savagery, as quaintly outdated as the astronomical understanding that inspired their fictive world. But these folks are not the only residents of Barsoom, as Mars is known in the local parlance. In fact the place is overcrowded. It has humans, of sorts, as well, and the problems they bring.

Having tried to put America’s War Between the States behind him, Carter inadvertently catalyzes a war between Martian city states. Theirs is more of a swords-and-sandals affair, if Lynn Collins as the lusciously bikinied scientist-warrior princess is any indication, but we can tell Carter’s up to it. And with a visual scheme so handsomely commensurate with fantasy artist Frank Frazetta’s eye-popping covers for Burroughs’ books, well, who wouldn’t be?
The princess’ father, an affably pudgy Ciaran Hinds, has arranged her marriage to a blandly villainous Dominic West, who’s been terrorizing the planet with powers on loan from passive-aggressively meddling non-Martian aliens led by Mark Strong. And from here it gets complicated.

Living up to reported uncertainty about whether it’ll become a trilogy, John Carter feels hurried and crammed. But the movie, like the man, is lighter on its feet than seems possible. Or at least highly committed to its own pulpy panache. You want to tease it for being so earnest, but there’s no time, too much to take in, so instead you just keep it, and the fistfuls of popcorn, coming.

Iran’s first Oscar-winning film, A Separation, looks at the domestic strife and break up of a middle-class Iranian family. (Sony Pictures Classics)

In a spirit of emancipation from hostility between their respective governments, the Oscar for A Separation becomes a goodwill gesture from citizens of America to citizens of Iran. As such it is well deserved. Writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s exceptional film rewards our curiosity to understand what Iranian life really is like. His answer is frank but also invitingly coy: It is like life. 

We begin within a divorce-court hearing, from the judge’s point of view. Middle-class husband and wife Nader and Simin (Peyman Moadi, Leila Hatami) sit before us: She wants a freer life for their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), and so has planned the family’s departure from Iran, but he won’t leave now that his father’s Alzheimer’s has advanced, and he wants Termeh to stay as well. 

“Your problem is a small problem,” says the judge. We sense an intention of irony here, and anticipate problem enlargement. Eventually Simin moves out of the house but not out of the country. That leaves Nader needing help with the care of his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), so he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devoutly religious woman of lower social standing and with domestic difficulties of her own. 

Razieh has a temperamental husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), a very young daughter, Somayeh (Kimia Hosseini), and another child on the way. Before long she also has a falling out with Nader, an ambiguous emotional conflict which prompts more judicial proceedings and escalates into a riveting ensemble examination of honor, pride, truthfulness, and falsity. Maybe not since Kieslowski has a filmmaker gotten so much juice from open-ended courtroom drama.

Leila Hatami and Peyman Moadi. (Sony Pictures Classics)

Plot-wise, A Separation might seem at first faintly play-like or schematic. (It certainly and very refreshingly does not seem like the product of a Hollywood-drenched imagination.) But plot, Farhadi knows, need not always be as it seems. People are his priority, in this case people pushed by everyday frustrations, and by each other, to their breaking points. Fundamentally plot is the consequence of human behavior, and these people behave as people do: badly sometimes. Their conflict occurs, we notice, within a mannerly society whose visible self-control appears simultaneously repressive and civilizing. The simultaneity is what matters.

Allowing only an organic symbology of human aggravations, like trouble zipping up a suitcase, Farhadi avoids explicitly cinematic distractions. The camera work and cutting are just so agile as to go graciously unnoticed. The performances, so effortlessly enlaced, each are independent marvels of subtle clarity. These people aren’t just movie characters; they’re souls. And so their simplest gestures—a spontaneous peck on the demented father’s cheek, an anguished glance passed between the daughters—convey great complexity. The film is not strenuous, but it feels like a workout. None of the feeling is cheap.

So much wrenching strife between Nader and Simin, and between him and Razieh, portends a tough future for the watchful Termeh, but we sense that Farhadi won’t let her down. (For starters, Sarina Farhadi is the filmmaker’s own daughter.) It’s a generous assurance. Nations or at least families deserve to hope that within even the biggest possible problem, solution somewhere lurks.