Beautiful City (2004)

Highly Recommended

Iran
Feature Film
Original Title: شهر زیبا
Writer/Director: Asghar Farhadi
Cinematographer: Ali Loqmani
Composer: Hamidreza Sadri
Cast: Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Ansari, Faramarz Gharibian, Ahu Kheradmand, Hossein Farzi-Zadeh

Farhadi’s complex yet subtle tale, exploring the moral ambiguities of corporal punishment, is a film that provokes us to ask difficult questions about difficult issues, questions that the film never really answers, as born out by the enigmatically unresolved ending, but he so beautifully paints a picture of a world that contains so many sympathetic yet conflicting characters, that a satisfactory resolution would simply not be possible. Iain.Stott