UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

FilmCriticLalitRao It is true that from a purely technical perspective, the freeze frame at the end of this film is quite revolutionary. A lot of viewers have expressed some positive comments about it. Hence, it would not be an understatement to call it one of the best moments in the history of cinema. However, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf goes much more beyond this accomplishment as 'A moment of innocence' attempts to recreate an important event of the past in present times for future generations using existential themes and film making process. As a young man, while protesting against Shah's regime, director Mohsen Makhmalbaf had stabbed a police man. Although he chose an autobiographical episode which occurred many years ago, there has been no attempt made by Makhmalbaf to glorify neither violence nor revolutionary ideology. It appears as if everybody has become more compassionate including the young actor chosen to represent Makhmalbaf. This pacifist strategy brings everybody connected to the film to the conclusion that violence is no solution if the world needs to be changed. It is only through love can somebody aspire to change the world.

jacques_05 Makhmalbaf has arguably created one of the MOST interesting films I have seen in my entire life. Casting young men unexperienced in acting to portray himself and the policemen he stabbed when he was 17, the director separates himself and his young self from the policemen and his; they separately train the actors portraying themselves 20 years earlier during an anti-Shah demonstration.Culminating in the showdown between the young actors, the truths behind the situation unbeknownst to both director and policemen become evident. An extremely powerful film, and I advise you to stop at nothing to view it.

amir-22 This is the greatest among the dozen or so Makhmalbaf titles I have seen. I was stunned that a movie so thematically complex (politics, history, redemption, etc.) can be conveyed with a superb lightness of touch. When you watch it, you really feel like you're watching a comedy. Only gradually does the movie reveal its many layers, culminating in a final freeze-frame that might be the BEST in all of cinema. More people should watch this movie! (It's certainly a lot more fun than anything by Abbas Kiarostami - a man who is more of a moral philosopher than a film-maker per se).

allyjack (WARNING - CONTAINS MILD SPOILER)The film ultimately freezes on the pivotal moment: the girl (a decoy, although the policeman didn't know it and had interpreted her proximity as romantic interest) in the middle; the soldier holding out the flower he wanted to give her; the young Makhmalbaf holding out the bread under which is shielded the knife with which the policeman was stabbed. An image of classic composition, frozen but alive with movement; the simplicity of the bread and the plant resonating against our knowledge of the underlying political tension (the young Makhmalbaf a radical protesting against the Shah; in one scene he and the girl talk idyllically of serving as parents to six billion people and of planting flowers in Africa).The film has a distinct melancholy - the adult policeman has a sense of wastage about the 20 years since then; finicky about his role in the film; although the theme of recreating old selves through the young actors has a strong undercurrent of renewal and redemption. And of course the film is about cinema itself, with the distinction between the filmmaking process and the film within the film, and between actors and directors, often provocatively unclear - this notion, amply explored in other works, is not where the film's greatest value lies specifically, although the restrained intertwining of cinema, politics, self-renewal and gentle anecdote is intriguing in this unfamiliar context.