It would be easy to write Fireworks Wednesday off as a melodrama, but Farhadi builds it so methodically and so intentionally, that you get a sense for every character, and every revelation hits harder than the last.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 9, 2017

Farhadi manages to skirt the political and focus on human emotion, deception and frailty with such force that his setting and artistic restraints are rendered near irrelevant.

| Original Score: A | Jun 10, 2016

Tehran on the eve of the Muslim New Year provides the backdrop for this engrossing Iranian drama about a marriage in crisis.

| Apr 28, 2016

[A] complex and magnificently acted melodrama ...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 28, 2016

Mournful, enigmatic and compulsively engrossing, "Fireworks Wednesday" gives viewers a chance to watch a master at work - before he was acknowledged as a master.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 28, 2016

Any time you get to see a radiant bride-to-be (Taraneh Alidoosti) try on her dress and admire her reflection at the outset, you know that bliss is in the crosshairs.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 21, 2016

It succeeds, as very few films do, with simultaneously presenting several distinct viewpoints without shortchanging any of them.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 21, 2016

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Asghar Farhadi is one of the world's top filmmakers, and there's an appetite for his work.

| Apr 14, 2016

A loopy, off-the-wall tragicomedy that chronicles a particularly stressful day in the life of a miserably unhappy couple whose marriage is on its last legs.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 8, 2016

What pulls us into "Fireworks Wednesday" is the universality of the emotions its characters display and the familiarity of the situations they find themselves in.

| Apr 8, 2016

It isn't the subtlest motif, but Farhadi's message is clear: Even the most idyllic-seeming marriage is nothing more or less than a series of landmines to be skirted with the utmost care.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 19, 2016

While not as brilliant as his 2012 Oscar-winning "A Separation" or 2009's "About Elly," the film has the same qualities of compassion and suspense that have made Farhadi one of the world's most acclaimed directors.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 17, 2016

Farhadi has a terrific sense of touch. He knows how to use visual and dramatic means to make a milieu palpable to an audience.

| Mar 17, 2016

Judged inside or outside of its creator's ongoing career-as early proof of his gifts or just a stand-alone domestic drama with the extra kick of mystery the filmmaker always applies-Fireworks Wednesday fascinates.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 17, 2016

Asghar Farhadi's exquisite, complex family drama approaches class conflicts and contrasts in contemporary Iran with a richly layered story.

| Mar 16, 2016

As with Mr. Farhadi's other films, every detail of speech and body language resonates.

| Mar 15, 2016

Not just interesting in how it foreshadows the filmmaker's more mature works, but also a gripping piece of storytelling in its own right.

| Mar 15, 2016

Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 14, 2016

This is a thoroughly engrossing and densely textured drama, showing Farhadi's cool skill in dissecting the Iranian middle classes and the unhappiness of marriage.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 6, 2014

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011