Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

The Color of Paradise (Iran 1999, 90 min, dir: Majid Majidi, cast: Hossein Mahjoub, Moshen Ramezani.

Some movies are so lavish they justify the extravagance of the big flat screen you bought for yourself. Mohammad has been sent to a special school for the blind in the city. He’s nearly abandoned until his widowed father comes to reclaim him and take him home.

Home is a long journey to a simple country life with a grandmother and sisters. Along the way the lavish color and abundance of nature fills all 46 diagonal inches of big screen, making home video a near-theater experience.

Once home in the country, Mohammed (Moshen Ramezani), adapts readily because his cheery personality is accepted by everyone. Only the father has bitter feelings about his life, and his relationship with his son. The boy is a burden in a life that, with the death of his wife, is suddenly without an anchor.

The film culminates in one of the most spectacular river calamity scenes I have ever watched. Perhaps you need to have run rivers to understand what you see cannot be faked. The boy is swept away and the father, after hesitating, jumps in too. The power of the river takes the boy, the father, and the horse and will not release them.

Natural life, like the river, is a vital part of Majidi’s theme that spans movie after movie. He loves to contrast city with country. The elements of country are poverty and human conflict. The complications of the city diffuse these and overlay these with hurdles that are for Majidi films, grave life impediments.

In Children of Heaven (MovieWithMe.com) the father and son must go into the rich part of the city to seek work so they can survive their subsistence life in a poor village at the city’s edge. In The Color of Paradise it is a blind boy leaving the shelter of the city for a bucolic life that is both delightful and lethal. Majidi doesn’t seem to weigh in on the values of city versus country except to point out that the vast difference from one to the other causes much confusion to the human beings who must travel between.

He is at his best with children: pointing up the innocence and tragedy they can exemplify so well. After seeing his films, take a look at Turtles Can Fly (MovieWithMe), another excellent Iranian film about children in Iraqi Kurdistan during the American no fly zone before the start of the Iraqi war.

Children of Heaven (Iran 1997, 89 min. dir: Majid Majidi, cast: Amir-Farrokh Hashemian, Bahare Seddiqui, Amir Naji.

Ali wins the race but cries because he didn’t make third place. If only he’d run a little slower he might have won the concession prize of a pair of sneakers and been able to replace his sister’s shoes that he lost.

There are a lot of reminders of The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio DeSica 1948) in Children of Heaven. The bicycle film is about a man and his son searching vainly for a stolen bike they desperately need for work in post-war Italy. In Children of Heaven, Ali (Amir-Farrokh Hashemian) and his father (Amir Naji) ride a bicycle through the wealthy suburbs of Tehran desperately sneaking work as gardeners so they can make enough money for the family to survive; and buy a new pair of shoes to replace younger sister Zahra’s (Bahare Seddiqui) pair that he lost.

The stories of both films play on the same theme: poor people whose existence is tied to essentials but who are happy in spite of the limits life has placed on them. The last scene of the movie, where Ali has finally accomplished his modest goals, shows him taking off his shoes, examining his blistered feet (from the race) and cooling them in the courtyard fishpond. The goldfish swimming around his swollen feet provide a feeling of peace and harmony with the world.

The fish give his feet a busa hamoni, a “bath kiss” in Farsi: what every mother gives her children in the bath. It is a peaceful end to a film that is about children and children’s concerns (lost shoes) and at the same time about larger issues like rich versus poor. It is also about how Iran’s well-regulated education system tends to obscure the lack of upward mobility even for kids who receive good education.

Rich versus poor is resonant theme from Bicycle Thieves (the original title, for some reason it became one thief, The Bicycle Thief, in the American title). De Sica’s film was dismissed in his native Italy because bicycles got stolen all the time. It was a hit in American hit: one of the Neo-Realism school of films honestly depicting the aftermath in war shattered Europe. The images showed poor people trying to put their lives together at a time when American style post-war capitalism, new to Europe, was rewarding the politically well connected.

These images were disquieting to an America during the post-war boom. Americans saw the US as a benevolent victor. If this was true, then how could these Italians be so distraught about losing a bicycle? Similarly, Children of Heaven shows Ali’s father, with Ali hanging on behind, pumping his bicycle through the dense traffic of modern Tehran and stopping at gated house after gated house begging for work as gardeners. If the Iranian revolution leveled the playing field then who are these super rich people?

The name “Children of Heaven” really asks the questions “what heaven?” and “whose heaven?” Life looks pretty good if you are among the elite. But when your father makes his living breaking up sugar with a hammer and tears roll down your cheeks because you lost your sister’s only pair of worn out shoes; is this really the egalitarian country its leaders claim?

Children of Heaven won the Academy Award for best foreign film. What were those overfed SUV driers of Beverly Hills thinking about? Did they see this as a sweet movie about two adorable kids? They are adorable, but you need to look behind the headscarves to see a society that is deeply troubled; and where a new revolution was beginning to find a voice.

When the film was released in 1997 it seemed sweet as the sugar Ali’s father hammered into bits. In fact, it was so sweet it was remade in an Indian version, Bumm Bumm Bole. Viewing it in the years since adds more history to the story of Zahra’s tattered shoes.

Leila (Iran 1996, 129 min. dir: Dariush Mehrjui, cast: Leila Hatami, Ali Mosaffa)

You can’t have children but you can give your husband permission to take another wife and you get to pick her. If this was an American remake it would star Adam Sandler and Sarah Silverman (actually, not a bad idea). But this an Iranian original and there is not an ounce of comedy in it.

Leila dearly loves Rez and he loves her. But the pressure of his family to produce a child is too strong for her to weather. She consents to the worst she can imagine: allowing her husband, under Muslim law, to take a second wife while she remains married to him.

The slow destruction, and final resurrection, of the intimate life between them is deadly serious, intense, and heart breaking. We see an Iran behind the headlines; in the interiors of wealthy houses where family ties are a bond as strong as love. Except for the multiple wife custom, it looks surprisingly Western and modern.

The couple try to work out their problems on long drives through the Tehran city nightscape, returning home to make appetizing dinners of kabobs and veggies. If it wasn’t for the women having to throw on chadors every time they stepped out of the house, you might think it was LA. In the family gatherings there is a lot of friction between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, but everyone eats exceedingly well.

Leila Hatami also stars in Low Heights, the airplane hijack movie also on MovieWithMe. There she also plays the long suffering wife, but at least she’s got a gun. Here she’s restricted to a kabob spear. See Leila Hatami for the performance she brings to a beautifully written story about the intensity of young marriage; and also see the film for the food: beautifully prepared and eaten.

Low Heights (Iran 2002, 115 min, dir: Ebrahim Hatamikia, cast: Hamid Farokhnezhad, Leila Hatami, Gohar Kheirandish)

Iranians hijack a plane to fly to freedom and the woman in the chador is hiding a gun? This sounds like a parody of Airplane, but is a serious action movie that makes points over and over despite its low budget feel. Ghasem has a plan to flee Iran with his little son and pregnant wife.

He’s convinced all his relatives that jobs await at the Total Oil Company if they come too.Packing the plane with your own relatives seems an original way to stage a hijacking. Too bad Iranian sky marshals are on board.

It’s easy to dismiss Low Heights at first. It’s talky like many Iranian movies (watch how much they talk in Farsi to say one line in the subtitles). The airport set is tacky, the plane interior looks like a cheap soundstage. If the plane never seems to really take off, the character do.

Remember this was made around the time of 9/11. Nobody was rebelling in Iran yet, and the country was still recovering from a long, devastating war with Iraq. Director Ebrahim Hatamikia made many documentaries about that war. Perhaps he understood that the Ayatollahs were not going to make life any better. Escape to the west, especially to America, was on everyone’s mind.

His characters seem very contemporary in their desperation to escape the strictures of the state. Even the sky marshals play the role of the tough guys we now call the Basji. But there are a few humorous character distractions that always appear in airplane in danger movies going back to The High and the Mighty.

How can you not sympathize with the guy whose got the gun until his mother comes down the aisle ordering him to give it up or shoot her? “Hijack, Iranian Style” might have been a better title than Low Heights. Titles like this are usual bestowed by sales agents at Cannes whose command of English is about on par with the actor who plays the pilot commanding this aircraft.

The Stoning of Sorayra M. (USA 2008, 114 min, dir: Cyrus Nowrasteh, cast: Mozhan Marno, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Jim Caviezel)

Jim Caviezel played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. In The Stoning of Soraya M. he plays a reporter happening upon a story about a modern woman who must walk her own steps to her village’s version of the crucifixion. This actor’s personal passion expressed in his adopting of special needs children, and his support of politically incorrect causes; makes his participation in this singular, powerful movie all the more interesting.

A movie is what it is on screen: that is everything. Or is it? The writer/director of The Stoning of Soraya M. is known for taking on non PC subjects and making statements of personal conviction. Both Caviezel and director Cyrus Nowrasteh are drawn to a story that defies audience sensitivities to paint truth, harshness, courage and sadness. Soraya (Mozhan Marno) brings dignity to her own death.

Mozhan too, is no stranger to speaking out. She starred in a one women show 9 Parts of Desire about women in war-torn Iraq. The play, written by Heather Raffo (also the title of a book about the Middle East by Geraldine Brooks), comes from Ali ibn Abu Taleb, an early leader and scholar of Islam who said, “God created sexual desire in ten parts: then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.”

Soraya M’s husband accuses her of adultery so he can be free to marry a younger woman he has found in a nearby city. That the punishment for adultery is death by stoning doesn’t disturb him. Nor does he flinch at throwing the first stone at the head of the mother of his children as she waits defenseless: buried to her waist in the village square.

It’s easy to eject the DVD after seeing The Stoning of Soraya M. and condemn Iran as a primitive country driven by the intractable dogma of the Ayatollahs. But Iran is, in may ways, actually quite permissive: if you are a man.

Soraya M. is about that one part of desire granted to men and how the rage, feared impotence and lust for domination over those other nine parts propels men towards madness and grisly murder. Ali ibn Abu Taleb did not restrict his observation to Muslims. Violence towards women can happen anywhere, and it does.