Half Moon.

"For his poetic fourth feature, Half Moon, the Kurdish-Iranian writer and director Bahman Ghobadi returns to the breathtaking desolation of the Kurdish borderlands and the enduring optimism of his people," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

For Aaron Hillis, writing in the Voice, the film's "picturesque road trip is less about preserving a musical heritage than accepting one's fate, a mythic trek that's both heartrending and boisterous - often as hauntingly absurdist as a Kusturica carnival."

Updated through 12/15.

"Half Moon displays both a sharpening of Ghobadi's filmmaking (his use of landscapes for both wry absurdism and somber reflection is especially assured) and, somewhat more problematically, an intensification of his penchant for the fantastic," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "Such flourishes prove redundant, however, in a film that at its most earthbound already poetically articulates the need to keep Kurdish tradition from falling into the grave of cultural crisis."

Earlier: Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

Update, 12/15: Online viewing tip. Tribeca artistic director Peter Scarlet has an 18-minute-long, clip-sprinkled talk with Ghobadi. Scarlet gets him talking about each of his films - A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq, Turtles Can Fly and, of course, Half Moon - as well as about the importance of national borders in his work, about what oil has done to the Middle East and about music.

Posted by dwhudson at December 14, 2007 8:37 AM