Crimson Gold (2004) Critic Reviews

This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie. Read the full review

An engrossing tale of class differences that reveals tiny details of one man’s descent into hell.Read the full review

Provides one of the rare glimpses of the upper class to come out of recent Iranian cinema--the last one in memory was 1996's exquisite, Ibsen-esque melodrama "Leila"--and director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) captures it vividly through his hero's wounded obsession.Read the full review

An extraordinary film in many ways, the least of which is its unorthodox casting. Read the full review

A flawlessly executed character study.Read the full review

Unfolds with a marvelously understated humanism.Read the full review

Succeeds as a universal account of frustration applicable to any urban center where the gap between haves and have-nots is tauntingly visible.Read the full review

Through everyday actions and gestures -- in Hussein's awkward exchanges with other people, in his tender fumbling of his fiancée's purse -- Panahi shows a man for whom life has become increasingly arduous, alien. The filmmaker captures, in other words, what Bresson called "the force in the air before the storm."Read the full review

The success of Crimson Gold depends to an intriguing degree on the performance of its leading actor, a large, phlegmatic man. Read the full review