Trips to Nowhere and Everywhere, With Iran’s Poet of the Cinema

From The New York Times:

The films of Abbas Kiarostami are at once simple and enigmatic, guileless in their formal and visual strategies and puzzling in their effects. A central figure in the blossoming of Iranian cinema in the 1990s, and a winner of the top prize at Cannes for “A Taste of Cherry” in 1997, Mr. Kiarostami, who is 66, has now settled into the pantheon of international master filmmakers, a status confirmed by the retrospective of his work that begins at the Museum of Modern Art today. The program, covering more than three decades and including shorts and features, documentaries and instructional films, provides plenty of opportunities to appreciate his plainness and to ponder his mysteries.

In “Ten” (2002) a woman drives through the dense traffic of Tehran, chatting and arguing with passengers who include a pious old woman, a prostitute and the driver’s combative young son.

More here.