Kandahar

Thanks to the shifting tone and manner of Kandahar, we wind up responding in many different ways at once, and if the overall effect is still scattered, the burden of making sense of it all–as art and as reality–reverts to us.

These lunar landscapes and grotesque visions are as strange and haunting as a science-fiction fantasy. Would that it were.

It's a simple series of snapshots from a country in pain.

Less interesting as a Westerner's primer on Afghanistan's horrors, the film becomes truly transfixing when it assumes the languid, neorealist style of the Iranian cinema.