Nice camera work. Predicament of being female in Aghanistan encapsulated through the experiences of a twelve year old girl. Relentless and bleak. Director used real people and not actors.

Given the restrictive boundaries of producing films for mass consumption, I thought Andrew Nicoll has done a great job of tackling this unsavoury business of arms trading. Cage is great, and his last monologue is devastating. Very entertaining indeed.

You gotta wait for the end to understand the woman’s behaviour. Has an authentic feel about it.

Full of sex and absurdity, this will make you chuckle. The acting is a bit ham (no pun intended) but hey you get to see Penelope Cruz and I mean a lot of her…but for me the movie fails in a big way. There is nothing to connect it all together.

The film is about an old woman who is about to die in a remote village in Iran. A camera crew has arrived to film the ancient ceremony that accompanies the death. They wait for her death. It is slow moving and repetitive (intentionally and effectively so) and it is complex and challenging. And in it, Kiarostami tells a vast tale. And as with the Taste of Cherry it is open-ended. This meditation, for that is what it is, passes commentary (sometimes ambiguous; sometimes all encompassing) on various dichotomies: life and death, rural and urban, local and global, the traditional and the modern, the religious and the secular, the physical and the spiritual.

The monologues are important in this film. Within these speeches the complexity of the film is revealed.

The last days of the nasty little man in his bunker.

Damn good. Even better at 35000 feet.

Very useful travelog which critiques islam in all its diversity.

Photography in this film is quite something. Raw and passionate. The film itself is quite a strange meditation.