A Separation

Imdb synopsis: A married couple are faced with a difficult decision - to improve the life of their child by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer's disease.

We are on a foreign movie ROLL, people.

One of the hallmarks of a good movie is whether or not you have strong feelings about it. Hear me out! If a film has gotten under your skin, made you cry, annoyed you (because of content, not production choices)or otherwise impacted you...it might be a good movie. There are plenty of movies that I've seen that I am NOT crazy about. I didn't like them, I would never watch them again but I would still recommend them to a friend because they are experiences that must needs be had. Punch Drunk Love is a good example. A Separation is another.

I really liked this movie because I thought it told a good story. The characters were compelling- even though the culture is different from my own, the story was not so farfetched that I couldn't relate. You are constantly guessing whodunnit, which story is correct. The dialogue (and subsequently the subtitles) is so fast paced I found myself wondering how the movie was directed- was it ad-libbed? Improvised? Methodically played out? 

That being said...this movie drove me crazy. The characters were so convincing that I had a hard time liking ANY of them. Much like Game of Thrones shows you reasons to like even the most hated characters, this movie kept throwing reasons at you to DIS-like characters. What you at first thought was black and white is, in reality, so murky that fish could swim through and you wouldn't see them.

It's really no wonder this movie won so many awards- there's a depth of human emotion here that many movies can't even begin to attain.