Still bold, still thoughtful, still witty, still confined, Panahi has made a film on the blessing and curse of creative vision.

| Feb 1, 2020

In Closed Curtain, Panahi finds the answer that he has been looking for all along.

| Jun 22, 2019

This is an eloquent and memorable film about an authoritarian state's constraints on artistic expression.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 6, 2019

The ending of "Closed Curtain" has a disappointing lack of focus. Still, the initial mood of the film is indelible.

| Feb 16, 2018

Closed Curtain enfolds its politics within what I believe will go down as one of cinema's finest, most complex acts of self-portraiture.

| Nov 27, 2017

It's a troubling piece that confronts both depression (suicide is a recurrent theme) and creativity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2015

Closed Curtain is the most opaque and sombre of the pictures to have emerged so far from Panahi's confinement.

| Sep 4, 2015

The film intersperses moment of great humour and power with indulgent follies that will strain the patience of all but the most resilient viewers.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 4, 2015

A powerful meditation on creativity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 3, 2015

Iranian director Jafar Panahi is under house arrest but, a testament to his ingenuity, Closed Curtain is the second in a trilogy of films shot clandestinely.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 3, 2015

Studiedly oblique and opaque, a self-reflexive essay about movie-making and artistic expression in a repressive society.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 3, 2015

There's a pleasingly surreal melancholy to where the film goes, and then it all turns quite meta indeed.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 1, 2015

An often challenging and ponderous work.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 31, 2015

We accuse directors who indulge in metatextual moviemaking of disappearing up their own rear ends. In the case of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, it's a choice between there and prison.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 20, 2014

The value of Closed Curtain is the very ineloquence of its cri de coeur. Where its predecessor defiantly showed that Panahi could take it, here the stresses show: they're tearing him apart, and it shouldn't happen to any artist.

| Sep 18, 2014

Under house arrest,Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bravely concedes that, at times during his incarceration, he's worn down, tempted to end it all.

| Original Score: 3 stars | Aug 15, 2014

The Kafkaesque story itself proves more engaging while the narrative illusion is sustained than it does when Panahi's imposed, solipsistic self-regard shatters it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 14, 2014

It doesn't carry the impact of some of Panahi's more conventional films. It's not his best movie, but the fact that he's making a movie at all is remarkable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 24, 2014

Unfortunately, Closed Curtain also indicates there's only so much an artist can say about his own oppression before he winds up in a creative cul-de-sac.

| Jul 24, 2014

Enigmatic, unresolved (perhaps deliberately) and strangely reminiscent of Bergman, Closed Curtain is not Panahi's strongest work but manages, all the same, to make visible the effects of a tremendous condensed power.

| Jul 24, 2014