Documentarylike realism and strong symbolism combine in the Iranian film The Apple, and it's not an easy mix.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 31, 2021

There is nothing more haunting than the faces of those two girls, two angels who were kept in hell for more than a decade and have emerged, blinking into the light.

| Mar 31, 2021

The feature debut of 17-year-old Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf, The Apple is one part docudrama, one part parable, and the altogether involving story of 12-year-old twin girls.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 31, 2021

[The Apple] hits upon simple, yet all-important human emotions that movies rarely capture.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 31, 2021

A comic, lyrical, and "politically incorrect" poetic docudrama so acutely focused in its characters and ethics that it can afford to be relaxed about them, all the more remarkable coming from a director still in her teens.

| Mar 31, 2021

The Apple would be a good film even without the extraordinary circumstances of its creation. And when you know the "back story," as they say in the movie biz, it becomes one of those truly amazing moments in cinema.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 31, 2021

Mixing documentary observation with unforced re-enactments, The Apple offhandedly exposes the deepest rifts in [Iranian] society and, despite digressions and imperfections, marks a fine debut.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 31, 2021

The Apple is a film both exquisite and trenchant, even more politically resonant than poetically resonant, as are so many Iranian films that are ostensibly about children.

| Mar 31, 2021

The lucid images, the bizarre drama and comedy, the reflections on Iranian society, provide more than enough to keep us thoughtful, charmed, and entertained. Go on, take a bite.

| Mar 31, 2021

The Apple closes with a beautifully poetic freeze-frame image in which a simple piece of fruit has come to represent nothing less than life itself and all its wonderful possibilities.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 31, 2021

Simple, painterly, [and] weirdly engaging.

| Mar 30, 2021

As a fledgling freethinker, Samira Makhmalbaf could hardly help but see Massoumeh and Zahra as an extreme case of the fate Iranian society has in mind for her.

| Mar 30, 2021

Makhmalbaf was only 17 when she started work on this project (with the help of her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, himself a renowned filmmaker). Her understanding of all members of the family is one of the movie's most remarkable qualities.

| Mar 30, 2021

Ultra low-key, but perceptive, film-making.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 30, 2021

The Apple has an acute feel for the city street and particularly the microcosm of life on a single corner -- the curiosity of neighbours, the busy negotiations between children.

| Mar 30, 2021

Rarely have the lines between documentary and fiction film been blurred with such formal audacity or righteousness.

| Mar 30, 2021

Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple is astonishing on at least three counts.

| Mar 30, 2021

It's an incomparably moving experience.

| Mar 30, 2021

It's a witty, gentle but often surprisingly acerbic little movie, slowly working its way towards a quite devastating final shot which underlines the need for an open heart and mind.

| Jun 24, 2006

The film has ethnographic, curiosity and some amusement value, although you may find it a strain to bring yourself to laugh at some of its humor, which is predicated upon the girls' developmental deprivation.

| Jul 21, 2005