A stimulating and highly accessible cinematic conversation.
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Village VoiceAaron Cutler
Village VoiceAaron Cutler
The filmmaker once responsible for virtuoso, tragicomic social critiques like The Cyclist (1987) and Marriage of the Blessed (1989) now delicately works to see how beautiful the world can look when people embrace each other's differences.
The elder Makhmalbaf, who wrote and directed, puts many spins on this ethereal mood piece — it is by turns poetic, impressionistic, metaphorical and even a bit trippy — without satisfying such genre basics as structure, depth and resolution.