Review: Jafar Panahi's 'Taxi' Is A Testament To The Director's Lively Storytelling Imagination

This is a reprint of our review from the 2015 Berlin Film Festival.

The deplorable mistreatment of multi-award-winning Iranian New Wave director Jafar Panahi in his native country (he was arrested in 2010 and now labors under a 20-year ban from filmmaking, on pain of a prison sentence) is the irreducible fact that hangs over his recent films, "This Is Not A Film" and "Closed Curtain." And it means that when we approach a new Panahi film these days, made with bravery, often in secrecy, and in direct opposition to the Iranian authorities, it tends to be with furrowed brow, and a portentous sense of the Political Importance of what we're about to watch. But almost from the off in his new film, "Taxi," Panahi himself slyly cracks a window on all that gravity: it's reflexive, intelligent, and provocative, to be sure, and has lots to say about Iranian society in general and the fine art of dissidence in particular, but it's also sort of a blast. It is rightly...