Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

rdoyle29 A group of friends go to the shore for a long weekend. One of them brings her friend Elly with the intention of introducing her to their divorced friend. About halfway through the weekend, she disappears. There's reason to believe that she may have left without telling anyone, but there's also reason to believe that she may have drowned. As the remaining folks look for her, and further consequences of her disappearance are revealed, cracks in the relationships are revealed and deepen. As with "A Separation", Farhadi takes a genre procedural plot and turns it into a drama about the morality and consequences of our decisions.

gjainroorkee A disappointment of gargantuan proportions. The ending is really really sad and it makes you want to bang your head against the wall. It makes you wonder what was the point of the whole movie. An anti-climactic ending, to put it extremely mildly. The movie trudges along slowly but the only thing that kept me going was that if the movie has an 8.1 rating, it might have an ending like "The Sixth Sense" or "The Illusionist" to make all the past 90-120 minutes worthwhile. But the ending was a dud, so the movie gets a measly 1 star rating for me. The universe would have been a better place without this movie. I wonder how many man-hours have been wasted all over the world over this movie. The script-writer of this movie should be made to dig his own grave until he dies of exhaustion in the same very pit. Say NO to such movies. I have got a very special set of skills that I am gonna use to find all such script-writers and....you know what I am talking about.

Red-125 The Iranian movie Darbareye Elly was show in the U.S. with the title About Elly (2009). It was written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. This excellent movie has been presented as a mystery, but I don't see it that way. I see it more as a film about the interaction of group of friends getting away from the constraints of Tehran to a vacation area on the Caspian Sea. The only person who is not part of the group of friends is a kindergarten teacher, Elly. She teaches the daughter of one of the friends in her class. A member of the group is back from his home in Germany, and has asked one of the women to help him find a wife. The unofficial leader of the group--Sepidah--suggests that Elly come along to meet this man. Elly is reluctant--for reasons we don't understand--but she finally decides to go along with the plan. However, after the first day, she wants to go home. What happens next isn't so much a mystery as it is a study of a group of friends responding to what may well be a tragedy.Taraneh Alidoosti plays Elly. Alidoosti has been named the greatest Iranian woman actor of the decade. (She may also be the most beautiful.) However, the real star of the movie is Golshifteh Farahani as Sepideh. Sepideh is obsessed with keeping Elly at the resort, and when things turn sour, she is obsessed with trying to hold the group together and make the best of the situation. Whether she will ever again be accepted as the group's unofficial leader is uncertain. Whether the group will even keep together is another uncertainty.My spouse pointed out that the ensemble acting in this movie is amazing. We expect it from "Friends," because that group of actors worked together year after year. But how did director Farhadi get such superb acting from a dozen actors who have never acted together as a group? I assume the answer is an immensely talented director working with highly skilled professional actors.The person who introduced the film is from Iran. She pointed out some very important facts that we would not have otherwise known. For example, the Caspian Sea is renowned in Iran as a attractive, exotic resort area. On the other hand, the surf is extremely treacherous. So the area is not only beautiful, but also dangerous.The introducer also remarked how difficult it is for sophisticated, educated people to maintain a sense of identity in the repressive culture of theocratic Iran. One aspect is that people lie easily, because telling the truth can sometimes lead to serious trouble. Everyone lies easily, even on minor matters. (They don't lie very well, but they still lie all the time.)We saw this film in the wonderful Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. Some of the sea scenes will work better on the large screen, but the film will work on the small screen as well. Find it and see it!P.S. As I write this review, About Elly has an excellent IMDb rating of 8.1. I love to see a great movie appreciated by the IMDb audience.

The_late_Buddy_Ryan "Elly" seems like a rough sketch for "A Separation" (2011), one of the best films of this century IMHO. In both cases, Farhadi's focused on social lies and deceptions and the ways they come back to bite us—as well as on the contrasts and contradictions between the lives and aspirations of contemporary Iranians and the restrictive social norms of Islam—but "Elly"'s not as tightly plotted or as involving. In many ways it's like typical film-festival fare from a non-Western country—it's a little hard to keep track of the characters at first, and it's not always clear why they're behaving the way they do… The setup's intriguing: old college friends from Tehran—three married couples and their kids and a recent divorcé—and a slightly mysterious plus one, Elly, share a clapped-out weekend cottage on the Caspian Sea. At first everyone's acting goofy, singing and busting little Zorbalike dance moves. Then something happens—two things really—and everything changes. The sky darkens, the sea gets rough, and husbands and wives are (almost literally in one case) at each other's throats. Suddenly these 21st-century sophisticates are chattering about evil portents and lost honor and fear of shaming; several layers of deception have to be unwrapped before the film's ambiguous ending. Expert cast (including the husband from "A Separation" and Nefertari from "Exodus: Gods and Kings"!); the performances seem a little over the top at times, but that may just be a cultural thing; great cinematography. Certainly worth watching, prob'ly more so if you've already seen "A Separation."