The Lincoln is excited to screen this Best Foreign Film Oscar winner. A Separation is a must-see film.
Set in contemporary Iran, A Separation is a compelling drama about the dissolution of a marriage. Simin wants to leave Iran with her husband Nader and daughter Termeh. Simin sues for divorce when Nader refuses to leave behind his Alzheimer-suffering father. Her request having failed, Simin returns to her parents' home, but Termeh decides to stay with Nader. When Nader hires a young woman to assist with his father in his wife's absence, he hopes that his life will return to a normal state. However, when he discovers that the new maid has been lying to him, he realizes that there is more on the line than just his marriage.
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Staring Peyman Moaadi, Leila Hatami
Reviews:
99% on the Tomatometer
'Morally complex, suspenseful, and consistently involving, A Separation captures the messiness of a dissolving relationship with keen insight and searing intensity'
Tampa Bay Times
Reviewed by: Steve Persall
'It's a mystery wrapped inside an enigmatic nation, flawlessly acted and difficult to predict. I'm always impressed when a movie informs about a foreign culture while it entertains, and this one is powerful art in that regard.'
Austin Chronicle
Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
'The story winds its way over the material, forcing the characters and the viewers to constantly reassess everything they have seen and heard.'
Miami Herald
Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
The movie has such a profound and compassionate understanding of human behavior, family ties and the way ordinary people respond when they're forced into a moral quandary, I can't imagine anyone not being transfixed by it.'
Arizona Republic
Reviewed by: Bill Goody
'A great movie, a look inside a world so foreign that it might as well be another planet, yet so universal that its observations are painfully familiar to anyone, anywhere.'
Boston Globe
Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
'This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.'
Chicago Tribune
Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
'The film is a singular achievement, a piece of realist cinema with the pull of a suspense thriller.'
Chicago Reader
Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
'The movie is hugely compelling on a moral and emotional level - I was completely hooked - yet it also revealed to me in numerous small and concrete ways what it's like to live in a contemporary theocracy'
Chicago Sun-Times
Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
'The actors, as sometimes happens, create those miracles that can endow a film with conviction. Moadi and Hatami, as husband and wife, succeed in convincing us their characters are acting from genuine motives'
San Francisco Chronicle
Reviewed by: Amy Biancolli
'Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation'
Entertainment Weekly
Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
'Farhadi is no mere formalist. His film is a spiritual investigation into the rise of women and the descent of male privilege in Iran, and a look at the toll that has taken. In a movie of flawless acting, it is Moadi - terse, proud, angry, haunted - who shows us that rare thing: a soul in transition.'
Slate
Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
'Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be'
Time
Reviewed by: Richard Corliss
'However ripe A Separation might seem for being adapted into a smart American film, Hollywood shouldn't bother. Farhadi's movie is just about perfect as it is.'
Salon.com
Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
'Something close to a contemporary masterwork, and maybe the best foreign-language film of the year, right at the tail end'
Christian Science Monitor
'A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.'
NPR
Reviewed by: Bob Mondello
'A film that captures the drama and suspense of real life as urgently as any picture released this year'.
Los Angeles Times
Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
'A Separation is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised'
Wall Street Journal
Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
'The members of the cast represent ensemble, naturalistic acting at its finest'
USA Today
Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
'Sophisticated and universal yet deeply intimate, A Separation is an exquisitely conceived family drama that has the coiled power of a top-notch thriller'
The A.V. Club
Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
'Beyond the impeccable performances and direction, it's foremost an exceptional piece of screenwriting, so finely wrought that the drama seems guided by an invisible hand.'
indieWIRE
Reviewed by: Eric Kohn
'It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.'
Time Out New York
Reviewed by: Joshua Rothkopf
'The drama it might remind you most of, oddly enough, is "Six Degrees of Separation," also about the snowballing connections between unlikely people. And as in that urban clash, the bedrock of it all is social responsibility, ever crumbling and rebuilding. A total triumph.'
Admission Prices*:
General: $9.00
Seniors, Students and Active Military: $8.00
Members: $7.00
Children 12 and under: $6.00
Bargain Matinee Prices (all shows before 6:00pm)
General: $7.00
Members: $5:00
Children 12 and under: $4.00
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*All prices include a 50¢ Preservation Fee that goes directly into our capital account for films.
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Film dates and times are subject to change and extended runs. Please check here, or our phone message at 360.336.8955, day of show.