A real one-off.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2013

By turns mysterious, moving, shocking and explicit - and very different from the kind of opaque and quietist cinema we might expect.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 5, 2013

A beguiling and perplexing piece of conceptual slow cinema from Iranian director Atiq Rahimi.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2013

It requires a leap of faith, but this handsome-looking film offers a disarming combination of insight, compassion and provocation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 2, 2013

Co-writer Jean-Claude Carrire was Buuel's screenwriter and this stark story of a life at odds with a society's laws bears the hallmarks of his earlier work.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 1, 2013

The film loses the palpable tension it manages to set up in the beginning

| Nov 4, 2013

Directed by Atiq Rahimi and based on his novel, "The Patience Stone" speaks for all oppressed women, for all oppressed people for that matter.

| Original Score: A | Oct 10, 2013

There isn't a false step from the quietly devastating Farahani; her tour-de-force performance carries the film through its rocky stretches.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 4, 2013

With a piercing edge, "The Patience Stone" is a cry from behind the veil, where a suffocating woman weaves a new life of her own design.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 3, 2013

The bare room where the husband lies helpless becomes a confessional where Farahani pours out the woman's life story in a performance that grabs you with its quiet yet searing power.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 19, 2013

A startling fantasy of Muslim feminist empowerment that allows the Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani to put on what amounts to a one-woman show.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 19, 2013

The details of the woman's life are like a crash course in the sociology of a country living through turmoil ...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 16, 2013

Some movies prove both immediately transformative - altering how we view the world as soon as we leave the theater - and long-lasting, demanding days or weeks of reflection.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 12, 2013

[A] quietly fierce condemnation of fundamentalist Muslim society's treatment of women ...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 6, 2013

The film burns with the collective anger of exiles, unfolding as an indictment of the Islamic customs and religious practices that oppress women in their native countries.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 5, 2013

Most impressive, however, is Farahani's lead performance. Though often pitiable, the heroine never registers as a martyr or a victim, but a relatable, multifaceted human being.

| Sep 5, 2013

It's a little on-the-nose. But "The Patience Stone" has Farahani, in nearly every shot, and in its meticulously paced way her movie-long confessional is something to see.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 5, 2013

From beginning to end, it's a very human story.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 29, 2013

Amid these horrors, the young wife retains not only the frailty but also the incandescence, the sheer staying power, of beauty.

| Original Score: B | Aug 23, 2013

With so many dramas depicting the varied facets of life in war-torn Middle Eastern countries, none are quite like this intimate depiction of a young woman's existence in The Patience Stone.

| Aug 17, 2013