Everybody Knows

Iranian director Farhadi opens Cannes with a film that explores the unhealed wound at the heart of a Spanish family with pitiless efficiency and sheer muscular flair

2255d ago

Everybody Knows finds Farhadi (working with longtime editor Hayedeh Safiyari) consciously going for quicker-than-usual cutting, rarely lingering over anything, always setting up the next part of the mystery. The acting’s uniformly strong, always at the service of a knotty story.

2255d ago

Asghar Farhadi’s ‘Everybody Knows’ Starring Javier Bardem & Penelope Cruz

2255d ago

Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem open old wounds in Asghar Farhadi’s too familiar Everybody Knows

2255d ago

Anyone familiar with the cinema of Iranian master Asghar Farhadi is well-aware of his tendency to place the inciting incident deep into a suspense yarn, long after we’ve grown accustomed to the characters’ routines.

2255d ago

To some degree, all of Asghar Farhadi's films might alternately have been titled 'A Separation' or 'The Past,' but this Spain-set drama starring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem is the first to feel repetitive.

2255d ago

Farhadi’s choreography of the shift from rowdy celebration to frantic desperation is the most effective part of the movie, and he keeps the suspense going on several fronts.

2255d ago

Yet the movie is not to be skipped. You should sample its mixture of bacchanal and gall, and revel in Farhadi’s dependable deftness, as he sketches and frames his collection of characters.

2255d ago

Everybody Knows rests a bit awkwardly between an emotionally complex melodrama and a shallow genre film.

2255d ago

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem's whodunit sucks the chemistry out of Cannes

2255d ago

The Cannes opener (in competition) was directed by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi ('A Separation') and stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

2255d ago

Everybody Knows is not Farhadi’s best work, but he does deliver an affair to remember.

2255d ago

Given the script’s reliance on tropes drawn from an extensive catalogue of kidnapping films, were it injected with a healthy dose of irony, all the overcooked plotting and preposterous intrigue could lend itself quite nicely to an enjoyably pulpy genre exercise à la David Fincher’s Gone Girl.

2255d ago

Everybody Knows — which is billed as a psychological thriller, though it’s really more of a family melodrama — feels meandering and indistinct.

2255d ago

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s mystery about a missing woman — starring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem — ends up slowly going nowhere

2255d ago