With her tart direct address, Leila makes a cheeky protagonist in “The Persian Version,” a Sundance-blessed dramatic comedy about the wide rift between an immigrant mother and her Iranian American daughter. Layla Mohammadi and Niousha Noor portray Leila and her mother, Shirin. They also carry the weight of writer-director Maryam Kesharvarz’s third feature, which braids comedy and tragedy, vibrant aplomb and thoughtful soberness.
In 2011, Kesharvarz made her directorial debut at the Sundance Film Festival with “Circumstance,” winner of that year’s audience award for dramatic feature. Set in Tehran, that LGBTQ-hued film focused on a well-to-do Iranian family dealing with their sexually rebellious daughter (and Daddy’s girl) and a son who recovers from drug addiction by replacing it with a fresh mania for fundamentalist ideology. “The Persian Version” moves between the present and the past and shuttles from New York to New Jersey to a rural outpost in Iran,...
In 2011, Kesharvarz made her directorial debut at the Sundance Film Festival with “Circumstance,” winner of that year’s audience award for dramatic feature. Set in Tehran, that LGBTQ-hued film focused on a well-to-do Iranian family dealing with their sexually rebellious daughter (and Daddy’s girl) and a son who recovers from drug addiction by replacing it with a fresh mania for fundamentalist ideology. “The Persian Version” moves between the present and the past and shuttles from New York to New Jersey to a rural outpost in Iran,...
- 1/22/2023
- by Lisa Kennedy
- Variety Film + TV
Brian De Palma has used the Italian film composer Pino Donaggio on and off for over 40 years, ever since their first (and still greatest) collaboration, “Carrie,” in 1976. Donaggio, with his lushly purple neo-Bernard Herrmann dissonant extravagance, is to De Palma what Angelo Badalamenti has been to David Lynch: a composer of rapturous dread-infused melodies that evoke a kind of meta-romantic Old Hollywood delirium. Yet to hear the unmistakable sounds of yet another lavishly orchestrated Donaggio swoonfest laid over the flat, static expository scenes of the choppy benumbed “international” police thriller “Domino” is to watch De Palma trying to create cinematic fire out of burnt-out match sticks.
There are legendary examples of directors claiming that their work was cut to ribbons by clueless producers: the 1954 George Cukor version of “A Star Is Born”, or Jonathan Demme’s “Swing Shift.” But what are we to make of a movie like “Domino,...
There are legendary examples of directors claiming that their work was cut to ribbons by clueless producers: the 1954 George Cukor version of “A Star Is Born”, or Jonathan Demme’s “Swing Shift.” But what are we to make of a movie like “Domino,...
- 6/2/2019
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
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