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Majid Majidi begins his new film with a caption dedicating it to the 152 million children who have been forced into child labor. It’s an important and sobering statistic, but not necessarily one that leads you to expect a rollicking hour-and-a-half’s entertainment.

In fact, though, “Khorshid” (or “Sun Children”) is quite the thrill ride, mixing a Dickensian, social-realist account of children in poverty in Tehran with a kinetic, far-fetched heist movie and a well-meaning drama about a kindly teacher who would, in a 1980s American film, have been played by Robin Williams. Majidi’s “Children of Heaven” was the first Iranian film to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, back in 1999 (Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful” won). “Sun Children,” which was the top prize-winner at Tehran’s Fajr International Film Festival in February, could have a similar crossover appeal.

Its hero is 12-year-old Ali (Rouhollah...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Dariush Mehrjui's The Cow is exclusively showing January 8 – February 6, 2020 in Mubi's Rediscovered series.The silhouette of a four-legged creature emerges over an indistinct horizon. As it moves, it splits apart and merges together a few more times, revealing itself to be a man and his cow. This sequence, presented in a series of black-and-white negative images, comes at the start of Dariush Mehrjui’s pre-Iranian Revolution landmark The Cow—the story of a man whose beloved beast dies suddenly, and who subsequently goes insane, imagining himself to have become a cow. (And not just any cow—his cow.) An adaptation of “Gav,” by writer and playwright Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, it’s a film of unstable, amorphous identity, for which that suggestive overture soon becomes emblematic. But given its ever-shifting borders, this portentous, almost phantasmic image also carries a different,...

In “Tale of the Sea,” the drama of lyrical despair that’s the opening-night film of the 1st Iranian Film Festival New York, the venerable Iranian filmmaker Bahman Farmanara, who wrote and directed the movie and also stars in it, plays Taher, an esteemed novelist who has just spent three years in a mental institution. Farmanara, now in his mid-70s, has a hangdog scowl, small burning eyes, and a jowly fleshy severity that makes him look like a literary-lion version of Charles Laughton. You wouldn’t exactly say his face lights up with feeling, but that doesn’t mean he’s not expressing anything. He has a world-weariness that tips into tenderness, and the silent haunted demeanor of someone who has grown used to seeing ghosts.

Taher is known to his acolytes as “Maestro,” and that word speaks volumes about his changing place in society. Thirty years ago, it...

Tale Of The Sea (Hekayat-e Darya) Reviewed for Shockya.com and BigAppleReviews.net by: Harvey Karten Director: Bahman Farmanara Screenwriter: Bahman Farmanara Cast: Bahman Farmanara, Fatemeh Motemad Arya, Leila Hatami, Saber Abar, Ali Nassirian Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 1/ Opens: January 10, 2019 at the First Iranian International Film Festival in NY: At IFC Center, 323 […]

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