Bear becomes a metaphor for fear. The filmmaker is not frightened of any dire forces. But he is also not willing to flee the consequences of his attempts at truth-telling.

| Mar 9, 2023

In the auteur’s latest masterpiece, every moment is suffused with not just purpose, but captivating beauty.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 23, 2023

[Jafar Panahi's] latest film, NO BEARS, is an ambitious, powerful piece...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2023

Panahi deftly juggles his stories, merging them together in the devastating final minutes of “No Bears.”

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 16, 2023

Witty and despairing in equal measure, “No Bears” is a fascinating cinematic layer cake of themes, sorrows, and banked fury.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 10, 2023

A master class in house-arrest filmmaking from Jafar Panahi.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 20, 2023

This film is terrific. What I really appreciate about Panahi... Is that he characterizes himself as something of an accidental disruptor, a curmudgeon.

| Jan 18, 2023

“This Is Not a Film,” “Closed Curtain,” “Taxi” and “3 Faces” have all been brilliant, but “No Bears” transcends them as both outlawed artistry and a moral interrogation of that art itself.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 18, 2023

Perhaps what is most remarkable about “No Bears” is how, despite all this heavy-duty baggage, it nevertheless averts despair. The reason for this, I think, is because the director Panahi equates filmmaking, no matter the risks, with freedom.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 12, 2023

There’s no way to watch this film without feeling mournful, or fearing for the man who made it.

| Dec 26, 2022

[Panahi's] work has not astonished like this in some time.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 23, 2022

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch.

| Dec 23, 2022

If watching a Jafar Panahi film is something of a political act, then it is also a soul-nourishing one.

| Dec 22, 2022

Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.

| Dec 22, 2022

It's a fierce critique of small-town traditionalism and religious dogma. But while this is an angry and ultimately devastating movie, it's also a surprisingly playful and inventive one.

| Dec 20, 2022

A testament to the power of film to challenge a culture of blind obedience, and also to Panahi’s efforts, as a dissident filmmaker, to build a cinema of defiance against the propagandist film apparatus of the state.

| Dec 14, 2022

Featuring an ensemble cast whose stories blur fact and fiction, this examination of life under a chillingly cruel regime pre-empts the fate of its director Jafar Panahi.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 14, 2022

In this startling work, [Jafar Panahi] places the responsibility on ordinary Iranians to act, even if it leads to heartbreak. Because, as with his latest deceptively sharp-edged meta drama, he knows that not every story can have a happy ending.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 14, 2022

Panahi goes at his subjects with an irrepressible cinematic verve that extends from the story and the dialogue to the performances and the very presences of the actors.

| Dec 14, 2022

Given Panahi’s own real-life suffering and repression, it is a testament to his integrity as an artist that he looks so critically at himself and so empathetically at those who are indifferent to, or might even support, his imprisonment.

| Dec 14, 2022