Written and directed by Jafar Panahi (Offside (2006)). Autofiction of sorts. Widely feted as one of the best movies of the year. Won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025.
A coincidence brings generic everyman/nobody Vahid Mobasseri into contact with Ebrahim Azizi who just maybe tortured him during a bout of incarceration for industrial relations activity. Abducting him, and after digging the requisite grave but failing to bury the man alive, he goes to George Hashemzadeh (in a bookshop) for advice who punts him to hard-boiled wedding photographer Mariam Afshari. (They later share some kind of minor-note PTSD romance that is underexplored.) The to-be-wed couple (Majid Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten) tag along in their wedding togs and she drags in her ex Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr as supposedly only he can positively ID the man.
I'd say it's just one damn thing after another if it weren't for the excess verbiage and histrionics. I felt it lost its shape with 30 minutes to go as the crowd mounts a quixotic mission to help the man's wife. (Don't they have ambulances in Iran?) The narrative arc is very similar to State of Siege (1972) and doubtlessly many other movies that try to show heroic human responses to implacable regimes. The cinematography is quite good; apparently it was an urban guerrilla shoot.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She bangs the Waiting for Godot drum. Peter Sobczynski. And so on. Most react to it more as a political document (bareheaded women, how things have changed!) than cinema.
The third of Costa-Gavras's paranoid/political thriller collaborations with Yves Montand for me to get to. Franco Solinas wrote the screenplay in consultation with Costa-Gavras.
Set in Latin America (some signage says Montevideo, Uruguay) where everyone unfathomably speaks French and United Fruit calls the shots. Family-man Montand presents as a technician with USAID cover who liaises with regional police forces on topics of communications and traffic. So far so The Quiet American (1955) but the local left wing is sufficiently organised to discern his involvement in violent reactionary activities. They abduct him and two (eventually three) others. His interrogation (a non-violent interview) is brisk and lays out the facts for us as he issues mechanical denials until an eleventh-hour crater. Concurrent events in the outside world show the limitations of the revolutionaries' opsec and failure of their strategy: their ultimatum only yields a loss of the moral high ground.
Apparently this was shot in Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile during the brief reign of Salvador Allende, based on the actual abduction etc. of Dan Mitrione. The cinematography is once again serviceable and improved by Françoise Bonnot's editing. There are some negative-space portraits of the kind that Sergio Leone made famous. Of the actors, O.E. Hasse has the most fun as a knowing journalist.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Wikipedia.
