Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

avik-basu1889 'Close-Up' on a technical level is docufiction where the distinction between what's real and what's fiction gets blurred constantly. But on a broader thematic level, I think it is a film that showcases the power and the magic of Cinema as a medium of art. It shows how cinema can inspire a nobody and give him/her a sense of joy, identity, catharsis and a relief from their tough unrelenting life. Hossain is a nobody. He is a poor working class fellow who finds it very difficult to make ends meet and lead a fulfilling life. He is constantly plagued by financial and existential inadequacy. But cinema gives him joy. He says Makhmalbaf's 'The Cyclist' is a 'part of him'. Seeing Makhmalbaf capture the grief and pain that he says lives with everyday, on screen gives him a cathartic experience whenever he watches the films of his favorite filmmaker. This is why when the chance encounter of him meeting Mrs. Ahankhahs takes place, he decides to impersonate his hero Mohsen Makhmalbaf. This impersonation of Mohsen Makhmalbaf also represents something else apart from Hossain's love and unconditional admiration for Makhmalbaf. What it clearly represents and is verbalised later by Hossain himself in the court is his need for respect, importance and a sense of control. In this way Kiarostami is probably making a meta statement about how filmmaking to a great extent is about control and importance. A person who wants to be a filmmaker is actually someone who wants to show the viewer the world from his/her perspective which inherently involves a position of control, respect and importance. Being treated with respect and dignity by the Ahankhah family gave Hossain a sense of fulfillment which is why he decided to persist with the act. He created his own world of make- believe to escape his tough real life. 'Close-Up' is a meta therapy session for Hossain. Kiarostami gives Hossain exactly what he craves which is attention and respect. Through his docufiction film, he allows Hossain to tell his story on celluloid and allows him to see himself on screen instead of having to be content with finding similarities between himself and the characters on screen. The ending is especially sweet. Hossain meets the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf and starts to cry. The very last shot of the film is especially profound - instead of the grainy documentary-esque photography, we get a gorgeously lit close-up of Hossain's side profile with the roses to the right of the frame - a visual cue to denote that the film was a tribute to the man on screen.P.S. - the moment where Kiarostami devotes a minute or so just to watch a can rolling down the street is one of those visual moments of cinematic profundity that will stay with me.

jason-m-cook Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990) More people should see Kiarostami's work. This is a fascinating example of it, the second of his I've seen but I have more on my Netflix queue. Close-Up is considerably more complex than it at first appears. Kiarostami makes a point of emphasizing the mundane. Those early scenes of small talk and casual conversation help to create a certain atmosphere that makes it all seem so real. Even later sequences which are re-enactments of earlier events do not appear to be artificial at all: I had to keep reminding myself that Kiarostami did not film the original meetings of Hossain Sabzian and the various family members. The irony of this is that Sabzian, while pretending to be the famed director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, claimed that he was going to put the Ahankahs in a movie... and as a result of this case, they did in fact wind up in a movie!The film shows a great deal of compassion toward Sabzian, and to everyone else involved for that matter. It is incredible to think that after the trial was over, they all agreed to participate in the re-enactments of earlier events. I don't like to give a film a 10/10 until I've seen it at least a second time, so I won't here... but on a rewatch it could well reach that highest rating. 9/10

Artimidor Federkiel Once upon a time in Tehran an unemployed, divorced, out-of-luck father of two is reading a book on his way home in the bus. Asked by the woman next to him about it, he boldly declares that he actually wrote it as well, a statement that leads to further questions, as this would make him Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the famous Iranian filmmaker... And so it all begins, the story of the impostor, Ali Sabzian, who is invited to said woman's home, suggests to make a film with her son in a prominent role in it, and what not. Well, it all ends with a trial against the impersonator, who - according to the members of this well-to-do family - must have been up to no good, planning to spy on them and eventually rob the house, or he was clearly mad and megalomaniac, but this idiosyncratic little fellow has his very own explanation...The recounted events really happened. The film "Close-Up" re-enacts them as close to reality as possible and was made by Iran's most proficient director Abbas Kiarostami using not only Ali Sabzian in the lead, but also the family involved in their respective parts. With these given parameters it is clear that we're dealing with much more than a semi-documentary, as in the tradition of other works of the New Iranian Wave we become witness of a powerful blending of film and social reality, and in this case completely at the heart of the subject matter. The book at the source of the whole ruckus was Makhmalbaf's script of "The Cyclist", dealing with a man who like Sisyphus is forced to ride a bicycle continuously for a week to help out his sick wife. What others perceive as a crook sees himself as "the traveler", a reference to one of Kiarostami's very own films - and he has a dream, a very unique Iranian one. It's a film with multiple layers and magic that shines from within like no other. Don't expect technical brilliance, dazzling sights and sounds or overblown melodrama. This one is real. Groundbreakingly so.

kurosawakira Some films are easy to talk about without spoiling much of what's happening. This isn't one of those. So even with the spoiler tag in place, I'll still drive you away here. Spoilers ensue!This film, Imamura's "A Man Vanishes" (Ningen jôhatsu, 1967) and Welles' "F for Fake" (1973) are the pinnacle of a particular breed of film. I'm not completely satisfied with typifying them under the taxonomy of any particular genre, but let's say that these films all share the curiosity for truth and cinema. All of them are constructed in the documentary style, all of them pretend, and ultimately all of them question their very form.Welles' film might be my personal favourite, but Kiarostami takes the ideas furthest. We have a real-life event, of which he creates a documentary. He then films the real-life trial but also recreates the events leading to that trial by using the very people involved. This might sound delicious enough an idea, but the real meat is in the fact that this wasn't just any crime, it was identity theft in which a real-life film buff impersonates as a real-life film director, leading the people involved believe he is using them for his new film.Kiarostami's style of film-making invites us to believe in what we see, especially in the courtroom scenes, but even there Sabzian is called out for acting by the son of the family. The film invites us to frame it like that – reality (courtroom) versus dramatized reality (the past incidents), but for me the gravitational center of the film is not in the re-enactments but in the real-time performance given by Sabzian in the courtroom. These scenes constitute the major part of the film. He acts two roles: Makhmalbaf in the re-enactments and himself in the courtroom scenes.In the end he is united with the real Makhmalbaf, a meeting that succinctly sums up what has been happening: you can see it as reconciliation if you like, you can see it as continuation or as a final swerve of the narrative as it flips around again to show the intentions of the film-maker. It all depends on how we perceive film in general, and whether we yearn for some form of truth and clarity, or whether cinema is all about raising questions about itself and the life it permeates without unambiguous resolve. As for my own film cosmology, I'm unsurprisingly leaning towards the latter.