This feels disappointingly soulless and retroactive—caught in a parallel gesture of celebrating and mourning twentieth-century cinema without ever clarifying what is truly at stake. The film, seemingly content with its incessant crosscutting between references, proceeds without any real risk, and as it unfolds one begins to wonder what, exactly, it is honoring or lamenting. Each episode functions as a hollow citation rather than a living variation, its gestures reduced to tired pastiches that accumulate references without ever coalescing into urgency,…

A battle between two different theaters unfolds here: a woman’s private theater versus the village’s collective one. The interaction between the mundane and the mythic is a running theme throughout Beyzayi’s work—from his plays to his films—and Ballad stands among his finest cinematic achievements in this regard. I remember not responding to the film in my initial encounters, but I feel I am finally coming to terms with it now.
On this rewatch, what struck me most was the delicate…

Panahi has never been a filmmaker particularly strong with dramatic movement within his films. Even in his best days—Crimson Gold comes to mind—he excelled in a post-Kiarostami, Kanoon-style approach that avoided big dramatic gestures in favor of subtle, everyday realism. His strength has always been in finding alternative, more intimate, mood-based, observational ways to explore social realities, rather than relying on tightly scripted, character-driven plots.

In It Was Just an Accident, however, Panahi ventures into a vengeance narrative set against…

One battle after battle, one door after door, one hallway after hallway, passage after passage. Repetition of time: present chasing past, history after history, failure after failure. A failed time. A stopped time. The question of stopped time: what time is it, really? A code DiCaprio’s character should know. A failed network of phones and codes. Past codes that no longer work—and even when they do, they resolve nothing. Lost time. Lost game. Lost revolution.

DiCaprio’s character wanders like a…