You cannot watch the film without feeling kinship with the characters and admitting their decency as well as their mistakes.

| Jun 19, 2013

Dynamically shot and paced like a thriller, the film has the density and moral prickliness of a good novel.

| Mar 7, 2012

Nothing earth-shattering happens in A Separation, but the straightforwardness of this view of a disintegrating marriage, set in the context of complicated cultural and religious mors, is dramatic by itself.

| Original Score: 8.5/10 | Mar 6, 2012

These people seem so real they might live next door. And they probably do.

| Original Score: A+ | Feb 23, 2012

"A Separation" is a plaintive fable of the human condition that unites us.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 17, 2012

Very few movies capture as convincingly as A Separation does the ways in which seemingly honorable decisions can lead to interpersonal conflict -- even disaster.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 10, 2012

Smart, provocative, and brimming with ungovernable human emotions.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 10, 2012

To say the piercing Iranian film A Separation is about divorce is a bit like saying The Wizard of Oz is about a pair of slippers.

| Original Score: A | Feb 9, 2012

Partly a courtroom drama, partly a political satire and partly a twisty thriller that gradually draws you in and becomes more engrossing with each new revelation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 2, 2012

"A Separation" is a great movie, a look inside a world so foreign that it might as well be another planet, yet so universal that its observations are painfully familiar to anyone, anywhere.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 2, 2012

The characters are deliberately ordinary, but their stories take on the weight of myth.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 31, 2012

Put simply, this picture is one of the great cinematic achievements I've ever seen, and in my opinion is the best film I saw in 2011.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 27, 2012

Asghar Farhadi's emotionally epic movie is not just a masterpiece dramatically, it is a movie dramatically of its moment.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 27, 2012

It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 26, 2012

This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 26, 2012

Some films wear their artistry so lightly they appear simply to be happening, the inner workings of the story guided by an unseen hand.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 26, 2012

The film involves its audience in an unusually direct way, because although we can see the logic of everyone's position, our emotions often disagree.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 26, 2012

This is primarily a human story about a marriage unraveling, the husband torn between love for his daughter and devotion to his father, the daughter torn between one parent and the other.

| Jan 26, 2012

Farhadi is less concerned with the bugs and variations in human perception than cracks in the average moral compass, little fault lines that prompt good people to make bad decisions.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 20, 2012

In the guise of a whodunit, Farhadi paints a nuanced portrait of Iranian society that, seen through our Western eyes, looks at once utterly alien and strikingly familiar.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 20, 2012