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

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

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

Less satisfying than his previous pic, yet still a bold, melancholy statement.

| Jul 18, 2014

A complex film-within-a-film structure uses the favorite techniques of reflexive Iranian cinema to assert the need to recount reality.

| Jul 18, 2014

This is one of those layered, fairly plotless and enigmatic films that comes into sharper focus as it goes along.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 18, 2014

"Closed Curtain" is richly allegorical, but the film succeeds even more as an exiled artist's reassurance that the law can't stamp out art.

| Jul 17, 2014

Closed Curtain can be seen to express something more than the plight of one artist in internal exile. That house on the Caspian, a home that's also a prison, represents an entire country in spiritual incarceration.

| Jul 10, 2014

If you're willing to roll with the tremendous loneliness, sadness and ambiguity of this tender parable about life and art in bizarrely constricted circumstances, it restores Jafar Panahi to us as something more than a noble sacrifice.

| Jul 10, 2014

Pahani's films have become increasingly indistinguishable from his complex life, making them a challenging but often thrilling experience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 10, 2014

Anoher self-reflexive piece of house-arrest theater that edges more ambitiously into fiction-or at least the blurry line between reality and creative fantasy

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 10, 2014

A spotty meta movie that might leave a viewer wishing Panahi could go back to making films that aren't about himself-which seems to be the point.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 9, 2014

On one level, the film ... is a mischievous, Pirandellian entertainment. It is also an allegory, dark but not despairing, of the creative spirit under political pressure, and of the ways the imagination can be both a refuge and a place of confinement.

| Jul 9, 2014