Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

colin-657 This is only my second Kiarotami film, the first was Certified Copy, 20 minutes into that I was going to give up, mainly because HE the character infuriated me beyond belief. I stayed with it and was soon after totally immersed. Approaching this film, I now was forewarned that I would be asked to think and reflect, to that end I had not read any prior comments. The set up is easy to understand; a room full of actresses watching a well known play, but that is the premise only, at least I could be aware that it could not possibly be happening in real time and this was a performance of a performance, the reactions are staged as much as the play we do not see. Where does its meaning reside I do not really know nor want to know, you can give it a feminist meaning, a political meaning and aesthetic meaning and surely it is all of these and perhaps more or perhaps less, Asking for meaning almost always diminishes true art

betty S it was the most awful movie you may watch in your whole life and I guarantee it.you want to kill yourself while watching.life is short.don't waste your time on such a disaster ever made.the story is ...let me say that there is no story,its just some actors who watch another movie and you have to watch their faces and the whole movie is this.it continue to the end ,maybe its good for a psychiatrist who want to study their character or their personality,I can't really say it was a movie.it was not.some people in Iran says oh this is conceptual art and you cant get it.its for special people(themselves) but when a work has a meaning behind it you can understand.it doesn't have such a thing.it doesn't even have a story line,a structure and a result.

Max_cinefilo89 Filmmakers like David Lynch or early Darren Aronofsky (Pi) have been branded as experimental, extreme, uncommercial. Okay, so their work is occasionally difficult, but at least they know how to reach out to the audience. Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin, on the other hand, gives a new definition to the adjective "experimental", its style being so radical no marketing campaign in the world would be able to endorse it outside a film festival like Venice (which is where I saw the film).Kiarostami, always a festival favorite, has truly gone where no man's ever been before with his adaptation of a classic Persian story from the twelfth century. The predictably sad tale revolves around a woman, Shirin, and her being coveted by two different men. A yarn as old as humanity, most will say. What can the director do to make it fresh and original?The answer is of the most audacious kind: instead of doing a straightforward movie, Kiarostami chose to film a stage version of the story, with a twist - we never actually see what happens on the stage. The whole 90-minute bulk of the film consists of a series of close-ups of over a hundred Iranian women (plus Juliette Binoche in a three-shot cameo) who are watching the play. All the action takes place off-camera, with voices and sounds allowing us to imagine what we should be looking at.With such an unconventional approach, Shirin is very simple and at the same time quite difficult. Few, if any, average moviegoers will choose it over something more traditional, and those who do will almost certainly find it boring. That's a pity, because the extreme style does serve a point, although it isn't entirely clear at first. The key to understanding the picture lies in focusing only on the actresses' faces: the minute one stops paying attention to the soundtrack (I was helped in that by the fact that the subtitles were faulty and didn't show up until 40 seconds after the lines had been spoken), it becomes easier to appreciate the simple beauty of Kiarostami's choice and feel a kind of empathy with those women, as if they were the real protagonists (and in a way, they are).So yes, Shirin is perhaps the most uncommercial film that will ever have been made, but since when does that translate as "unwatchable"? It's an acquired taste, for sure, but after the initial wave of frustration it might be possible to feel a more positive emotion kick in.

alan fair Kiarostami has proved here that one can reach the truth of cinema by the most direct route, to examine the faces of the women members of a film audience while they watch, an unseen to us, film of the great 12th century Persian epic poem, 'Khosrow and Shirin' Kiorstami's slow tracking camera traces the faces of 114 famous Iranian actresses and one famous French actress. Despite the potential for a forensic piece, the work is in fact a poetic study of the feminine face that recognises the emotional as well as intellectual process involved in watching a film. We are caught in a kind of mise en abyme of spectatorship and although we are never given the opportunity to see the film these faces respond to we are, nevertheless, caught in the narrative of the romantic epic, the faces themselves display the richness and complexity of a reading; tears, smiles, quizzical glances, the turning away through lowered lids, all of these responses combine to form a group portrait as symphonic construction. It may sound like watching paint dry but in fact the film is a welcome relief from the kind of action cinema that has become a numbing experience in contemporary cinema. The chance to see beauty is rare in cinema today, here we are allowed time to relish the female face. We might see this film as returning us to the early cinema of Hollywood that rejoiced in the first truly cinematic rhetorical trope, the close-up. In this sense 'Shirin' is a triumphant celebration of cinema itself.