10

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's camera never leaves the dashboard of the car, and yet an entire hidden world — that of upper-middle class Iranian women — opens before our eyes. It's a remarkable achievement, considering that the camera is pointed inward the entire time, trained on either the driver or her passenger as the car moves through the busy streets of Tehran. Deceptively simple, the film is ingeniously structured around a series of ten encounters between the car's owner, an attractive, unnamed divorcee (Mania Akbari), and six passengers. The first is her son, Amin (Amin Maher), an angry adolescent who resents the fact that his mother not only di...