Rating: 
Summary: The Best Movie I have ever seen!
Review: It is natural for the intellectually challenged viewer to dislike this movie. However, for the intelligent viewer, this movie will be a one of a kind experience. I have never seen a movie as great as this. I encourage everyone to get a hold of it and see it.
Rating: 
Summary: It's not just that this is slow...
Review: It's not just that this is slow-- some of the greatest films of all time (Dreyer, Bresson, Ozu) are extremely deliberate in their pacing, the better to concentrate the viewer on minute details and tiny tremors of feeling. It's that it's slow and doesn't deliver much to deserve the concentration required. There's just not much here to justify the running time. The improvised conversations are only moderately interesting (and that's assuming you survive the first major one, with the soldier, which is virtually content-free). The characters are close to being ciphers; I could live with not knowing why Mr. Badii's doing what he's doing, but he hardly says anything personal about anything ("I enjoyed my time in the army" is about as deep as we get). The shots of roads are not much more artful than random shooting out of a car window with a video camera (at least Antonioni's or Tarkovsky's films are exquisite even when maddeningly empty). The message is basically the same as the one in American Beauty (life is wonderful because of some quotidian detail of day to day existence). This is a fairly large bag to hold such a small thought, and it's got a lot of room to bounce around in undisturbed by any others. Compare to another recent Criterion release, Dreyer's Day of Wrath, and you'll see the difference between a filmmaker at peak intensity during every second of a slowly-paced film, and one merely mistaking tedium for significance.
Rating:
Summary: Khayyám at 24 FPS
Review: Khayyám was a few centuries before Nietzsche and Sartre in his questioning and denial of religion and god. It should also be no surprise that he was the contemporary of Khawrazmi, the Persian mathematician who has given the world the idea of zero, or NOTHING.
The abstraction of nothingness as dust is prevalent in Khayyám's work. So it is in this presentation. The alienation of modern man from nature too ties Kiarostami and Khayyám in an inverse manner, where Khayam saw all nature as nothing, except for the short flash of life, Kiarostami presents nature as a flash in a lifetime, of course along a long and winding road, where a single taste of cherries is equivalent to taking in the whole universe and attaining the freedom to evaluate life on YOUR own terms. If you choose to forgo cherries and mulberries to spare the ones you wish to live better, it is true shining of life.
The "naturalist" who tries to convince our hero, who is as bitter as any "Omar", that the taste of cherries is sufficient to give meaning to everything and make up for all angst, survives by stuffing birds. Are these not the same 900 year old birds who in Khayyám's poetry ask the question of being and nothingness from atop ruins of bygone kings?
There is not enough room here to get into the cinematography and camera work in this movie. Obviously Kiarostami has watched a lot of Kurosawa too. None the less,
the final scene of the movie is simply beyond expectation. In the age of cold "media", the use of hand held video makes reality into a story, no matter how elating or how painful it might have been, it cools it to a story to be reviewed. Kiarostami uses this device to review a whole life before it is extinguished.
There must be an equivalent to "reviewing one's life" in Khayyám's work which I have not discovered, at least not succinctly yet. Kiarostami may know it but doesn't, or can't tell us. But, so it was Khayyám's problem.
Rating:
Summary: Took me a while to understand and enjoy, but worth the wait!
Review: Right after seeing this movie for the first time I was disappointed - even angry about the ending... but I couldn't stop thinking about it. It felt like some strange and quiet dream. Later, I watched the interview with the director Abbas Kiarostami that follows the closing credits - I'm so glad I did! It really helped me better understand and enjoy the movie(and others). I recommend watching the interview before the film. Slow down and enjoy this.
Rating: 
Summary: Think....
Review: Taste of Cherry, is not your usual Hollywood style film. It is an art film, with a complicated moral structure and a rather confusing ending.... Instead of defining everything and connecting the lines from A to B to C, the Iranian director, allows you to make the journey yourself and Think....
Rating:
Summary: Squandered Potential
Review: The basic skeleton of this movie (guy looking for help with his suicide plan) has huge philosophical and spiritual potential. However, this movie delivers almost nothing of what it could have. I guess the director wants to leave all of the thinking to the audience. What it left me thinking is, "Why does Mr. Badii want to kill himself?" Another thing I was left thinking was, "Why are they wasting so much time showing Mr. Badii driving around?" This movie would have been great if it had only been half an hour, because there is at least one hour of this film devoted to showing a truck driving around.
Rating:
Summary: Squandered Potential
Review: The basic skeleton of this movie (guy looking for help with his suicide plan) has huge philosophical and spiritual potential. However, this movie delivers almost nothing of what it could have. I guess the director wants to leave all of the thinking to the audience. What it left me thinking is, "Why does Mr. Badii want to kill himself?" Another thing I was left thinking was, "Why are they wasting so much time showing Mr. Badii driving around?" This movie would have been great if it had only been half an hour, because there is at least one hour of this film devoted to showing a truck driving around.
Rating:
Summary: Riding in cars with strangers
Review: The customer reviewers who grew impatient with the car ride in Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherries must be stuck in the "are we there yet?" element of childhood rather than in its openness to impression. I liked the advice of reviewer Achilles Kyriakopoulos just to "concentrate on what you see." Submerse yourself in what you see and understanding will follow. Surrendering to the (always sumptuous) visual in Kiarostami's movies yields powerful insights into our complicated species. We bound along dirt roads in his car with Bari, the central character, on a strange mission through the white dust of the bleached outskirts of Tehran and the red dust of the barren countryside. No juiciness, greenness, or comfort in the prospects for this ride. Why should there be? Bari has none. Bari, looking for someone to help him complete the last stage of a mission, is picking up strangers and making an unusual proposal to them. When they hear it, the rising, naive fear of a young soldier, the creature simplicity of a plastic bag collector, and the compassionate inexperience of a seminary student are reflected in the faces of these men. Bari is asking to have some earth shoveled over him after his suicide. The soldier runs away in plain horror; the plastic-bag man, who seems rendered imbecile by poverty, sticks to collecting inventory for sale to support his family; and the seminary student escapes through his theology. What can you do when you're watching the film and are thus stuck in the car with this man Bari? Stop watching? Grieve that he's past being moved by the human graces we encounter on the road-the beliefs and commitments, the lending hands, the cups of tea offered out of courtesy or fellow-loneliness? Not that we'd be sane viewers to expect him to be changed by any of this, or even for him to drink the tea. Like the barren views out the car windows, Bari is pared way down. (And any viewer reaction to Bari's state of being is individual and optional because Kiarostami never programs feeling-responses.) Then comes the old taxidermist's lined and weary, pragmatic, maybe even authentically kind old face, and the plot, as they say, thickens. Will the taxidermist's tale of his own attempted suicide help to change Bari's mind? Or will Bari act on the taxidermist's agreement to bury him? Why does Bari later pursue him through the beautiful gates to his workplace? Or how much does money have to do with anything?
But Kiarostami lives to subvert whatever plot he allows to build. And while the visual has carried us deep and far, it has also led deep and far into labyrinths of radical philosophical questions regarding suicide-one's own or another's. Kiarostami's movies leave you knowing a lot, but you have to revise your definitions of knowing to know you know it. Children are really too smart to be spooned out truths, and I
like to think that we are as grownups as well. Here's a director who throws us back on our natural, childlike (not childish) instinctual resources when it comes to understanding and especially to enjoying deeply. Forgive the triteness, but such is the place within us where art is made, and whatever can be more satisfying than that? I think that Taste of Cherry is both less complex in its conception and less ecstatically inspired than the later The Wind Will Carry us, which is one of my favorite films ever. But so far, I've loved the pull to parts of my being that Kiarostami films make and other directors' films touch little or not at all.
Rating:
Summary: ASTONISHING GENIUS
Review: This film is ample proof that Kiarostami is the world's greatest living filmmaker. There is more genius in 5 seconds of any of his films than all Hollywood trash put together. A genius, who seems to live up to Fellini's maxim, 'There is no beginning. There is no end. There is only the infinite passion for life.' I've seen all of his US dristributed films at the cinema, over and over and over again and each time, I'm more awed.
Rating: 
Summary: Why bother?!? Save your money for something with substan
Review: This has to be the most boring movies I've ever seen in my life. There happen to be some excellent films coming out of the Middle East. This is NOT one of them. Save your money and wait till something worthwhile is actually released on DVD. If your looking for a film 'masterpiece' - look elsewhere - you're not going to find it here!
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