Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1990 • Iran
Starring Hossein Sabzian, Abolfazi Ahankhah, Mahrokh Ahankhah
Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and CLOSE-UP is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, CLOSE-UP has resonated with viewers around the world.
Up Next in Sight and Sound Directors’ Poll: Greatest Films of All Time
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Beau travail
Directed by Claire Denis • 1999 • France
Starring Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire ColinWith her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor,” Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked ...
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Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1954 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko TsushimaOne of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI (SHICHININ NO SAMURAI) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to pro...
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Breathless
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • France • 1960
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel BoulangerThere was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspi...
