[FIVE STARS- HIGHEST RATING]
"FILM OF THE WEEK!"
"THE MEANINGS OF CLOSE-UP SHIFT SUBTLY AND PROFOUNDLY, WITH EVERY VIEWING; THE ONLY CERTAINTY IS THAT ITS REWARDS ARE BOUNDLESS."
– Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York. Click here to read entire review

“This must-see – in many ways, the Iranian New Wave's seminal creation – will never age out.
Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life and death.”
– Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice. Click here to read entire review

“20 YEARS ON, CLOSE-UP IS STILL AWESOME!”
– Nicolas Rapold, The L Magazine. Click here to read entire review

“Kiarostami’s calmly unwavering images, with their wry humor and generous sympathy,
have the force of a quiet, steadfast resistance.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“SUBLIME! The confusion of aesthetic forms doubles the confusion of social hierarchies, of law and morality,
truth and deceit, and art and life. Yet, the audience never feels stranded in a mire of postmodern uncertainty.
Lighthearted and entertaining throughout, Close-Up is cinema as reconciliation—
human reconciliation as well as the reconciliation of incongruous realities.”
– Patrick Harrison, Artforum. Click here to read entire review

“The greatest documentary about filmmaking ever made.” – Werner Herzog

(1990) A reporter frantically going door to door to bum a tape recorder for his Big Story; a middle-class Teheran family falling for semi-employed movie nut Hossein Sabzian’s spur-of-the-moment impersonation of acclaimed film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar) on a crowded bus; a fraud trial over a phony movie project, the arrest seen twice from different perspectives, including the bleakly staring arrestee’s; and the real Makhmalbaf appearing in person via motorcycle at the jailhouse door — what’s real and what isn’t in the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s Chinese box blurrings of documentary and ...? Kiarostami filmed the real-life trial, the good-sport major participants — including the suckered family and painfully sincere, passionately movie-crazed Sabzian — played themselves in reenactments; with the climax pure vérité, complete with in-and-out sound recording thanks to a balky mike. Cannes Palme d’Or winner for Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami’s oeuvre has been compared at various times to Satyajit Ray, Jacques Tati, and Vittorio De Sica — but is ultimately uniquely his own; this was in a way his ode to cinema. “Kiarostami’s films are extraordinary. Words can’t relate my feelings. See his movies and then you’ll see what I mean.” – Akira Kurosawa. Color; Approx. 100 minutes.
1:30, 3:30, 5:40, 7:50, 9:50
A JANUS FILMS RELEASE

“Part nonfiction essay, part neorealist drama and totally revolutionary, Kiarostami’s live-or-Memorex portrait doesn’t break vérité rules so much as make them irrelevant.” – David Fear, Time Out New York “Kiarostami's masterpiece is a rich, multi-layered but beautifully forthright film. Kiarostami constructs a complex (but never complicated) series of interwoven narratives to interrogate notions of fiction and documentary, appearance and reality, truth and falsehood. It's enormously intelligent stuff, witty, poignant and thoroughly engrossing, and ends with one of the sharpest, funniest deconstructions of film form ever shot. Absolutely wonderful.” – Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London) “The must-see Iranian Godardian knot of a movie, Close-Up has artichokelike layers that, once peeled, are forever resonant. His unpredictable, and unpredictably moving, investigation into the silent collision between genuine experience and cinema isn’t only about the viewer’s perspective, but about Kiarostami’s own... Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life, death, and meaning.” – Michael Atkinson, Village Voice “Few figures in the history of movies leap from screen to become not just characters but paradigms, beacons that illuminate the paradoxical nature and power of the medium even as they exercise their own unique fascinations. The Little Tramp, Charles Foster Kane and a handful of others: these are the cinema's resonant, iconic Quixotes, whose significance surpasses even the films that contain them. At the end of the 1990s we can add another name to their select company of unforgettables: Hossein Sabzian.” – Godfrey Cheshire