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 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 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 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

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 12, 2002

Makhmalbaf's impeccable feature-film debut is a witty and precociously intelligent docudrama.

| Mar 5, 2002

Veracity is undermined by the very idea that the subjects somehow are actors in their own story -- and yet The Apple is still quite touching.

| Apr 3, 2001

At once an effulgent exercise in life-affirmation and a bemusingly crude piece of exploitative filmmaking.

| Apr 3, 2001

Makhmalbaf doesn't make it hard to figure out that she intends the film as a metaphor for the condition of all women in Iran -- any one of the dozen shots of the girls chasing after an elusive apple makes that clear enough.

| Apr 3, 2001

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 3, 2001

Perplexing and provocative.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 3, 2001

Experimental docudrama, open-ended essay, The Apple is a remarkable movie.

| Apr 3, 2001

In its own quiet way, Makhmalbaf's auspicious feature debut echoes [a] sense of rebellion not only against such sexual discrimination, but also against all forms of inequality and injustice.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 3, 2001