A lovely-looking, capably made motion picture.

| Mar 1, 2007

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 21, 2006

[A] plodding and pretentious historical drama.

| Mar 22, 2006

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 21, 2006

Comes to us wrapped in hand-woven shawls of struggle and perseverance.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 20, 2006

While sumptuously beautiful, the film is often stilted and undermined by some painfully amateurish performances that no good intentions can smooth over.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 13, 2006

The writing, acting and direction are so amateurish that the only thing you'll care about is escaping the theater.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 13, 2006

The director approaches the enormity of his task with an earnest enthusiasm, offering a likable alternative to the assembly-line banality of so many family films.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 13, 2006

More education than entertainment, Mashayekh's first feature length film tells a valid story but fails to produce on the promise of court intrigues and swordplay.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 13, 2006

The story behind the making of The Keeper is more inspiring than the film itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 12, 2006

Ambitious, heartfelt and grand in both its ideas and its pride of place (the Middle East), the film suffers from its virtues.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 12, 2006

A reverentially pokey drama that plays less like a conventional movie than a lengthy series of hagiographic historical tableaux.

Full Review | Jan 11, 2006

The Keeper suffers from a surfeit of scattershot acting and clunky narrative devices that usher the viewer back and forth through time with all the subtlety of a culture clash.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 31, 2005

The movie's intentions are like the starry constellations that inspire the eponymous hero: out of reach.

| Dec 15, 2005

In story structure, performances, pacing, and dialogue, the film's the work of a first-timer. In its deep love for an ancestral culture, it shines.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 15, 2005

The movie gets historical with the warring factions in Persia, Hassan's attempt to assassinate the Sultan, and other Lawrence of Arabia style stuff in the desert.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 11, 2005

For those who know of Omar Khayyam, make the trip to the theater to see this one. If you're just curious, wait for the DVD.

| Original Score: 6.5/10 | Nov 3, 2005

Rough around the edges, it's still a formidable movie that's stunning visually.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 19, 2005

An accomplished first film that manages to comment on the current situation in the Middle East while dealing movingly -- and in very human terms -- with the importance of heritage and history in contemporary life.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 24, 2005

Would that good intentions counted for everything.

| Jun 10, 2005