★★★★★
"Reviewing This Is Not a Film in 2012, the great Philip French commented, “There is unlikely to be a wittier, braver, more serious film shown in Britain this year.” Three years on, exactly the same can be said about Panahi’s latest."
Jonathan Romney, The Observer
★★★★
"Jafar Panahi is the Iranian film-maker and democracy campaigner facing official harassment with unique wit, grace and humanity – all apparent in his new movie Taxi Tehran, whose quietly defiant good humour and charm will grow on you, as they grew on me when I first saw it in Berlin earlier this year. It is engaging and disarming: a freewheeling semi-improv piece of guerrilla film-making, cleverly staged and choreographed, with the discursive, digressive qualities of an essay film."
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"Absolutely wonderful"
Catherine Shoard in The Guardian Film Show
★★★★★
"A movie — clandestinely made like its two precursors — of corrosive intelligence and gleaming courage."
Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times
★★★★
"Reveals Panahi at the top of his game"
Kate Muir, The Times
"Jafar Panahi’s latest offering is a playful journey through the capital of Iran and Iranian cinema itself"
Tim Robey, The Daily Telegraph
★★★★★
"A sly, subversive stand in favour of empathy."
Glenn Heath , Little White Lies
★★★★★
"With just three tiny cameras, a bunch of roses and no budget, this enchanting film shot in the back of a taxi shows how little you need to make a great movie."
David Sexton, The Evening Standard
★★★★
"His cheekiest and most playful subversion yet."
Donald Clarke,
The Irish Times
★★★★
"This is guerrilla film-making with a difference"
Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent
★★★★
"an intriguing portrait of a city and its people in which there is a good deal of wit and wisdom in the way individuals discuss justice, freedom and the way that technology could be a force for liberation in 21st-century Iran."
Allan Hunter, The Daily Express
"A grand panorama of city life, given shape by cruel oppression."
Danny Leigh, The Guardian - The Farsi and the Furious: Article on cars in film
Fugitive from censorship Jafar Panahi takes to the road
Trevor Johnston, Sight & Sound
"Oppression has transformed Panahi’s art. Under the pressure of circumstances, he has turned from a classicist into a modernist, while at the same time transforming the very codes and tones of his frame-breaking aesthetic."
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"Taxi," which offers, in its unassuming way, one of the most captivating cinematic experiences of this year. Though it is gentle and meditative rather than confrontational, the film nonetheless bristles with topical concerns. It begins with a tense back-seat argument about the death penalty and eventually turns its gaze on poverty, violence, sexism and censorship. Like Mr. Panahi’s cab, his film is equipped with both windows and mirrors. It’s reflective and revealing, intimate and wide-ranging, compact and moving. A O Scott,
The New York Times
★★★★★
'This spry, sharp and relentlessly clever middle finger to censorship is Panahi’s boldest act of defiance to date...
Taxi is a brilliantly humane testament to the fact that, in the 21st century, cinema is truly everywhere, and Jafar Panahi is still in the driver’s seat.
David Erlich, Time Out
"For the comic gem "Taxi," he adopts a playful mood and the guise of a cabdriver tooling through the streets of Tehran. It's an act of defiance that's also a sublime piece of cinema, and it ranks among the director's finest work."
Sheri Linden, The L.A. Times
'All this could have yielded something clammy and cloistered, just as Panahi’s status as a martyr for his art could have gulled him into loftiness and pride; and yet, by some miracle, “Taxi” stays as modest as his smile, the point being not to recruit us to his cause but to put us on the side of his compatriots. The mocking of oppression may be steely, but the film’s an easy ride.'
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
'Once again creating cinema in spite of Iran's twenty-year edict forbidding him to do so, this most daring of directors, set free from house arrest, has ventured out into the streets of Tehran to document truths through fiction... Taxi is paced like a revue, with a showman's élan. The riders, all played by unidentified amateur actors, initiate comic and dramatic scenes that first reveal certain complexities of Iranian life.'
Allan Scherstuhl, Village Voice
'Here the act of filming the everyday is shown as hugely important, for it captures indispensable evidence of hidden truths in a society where image-making is subject to state suppression.'
Jonathan Romney,
Film Comment
“The genius of Jafar is that of course he’s working in the tradition of the Persian miniature,” said the theater director Peter Sellars, who introduced “Taxi” at the Telluride Film Festival this month. “You can do some tiny, tiny gesture which is a whole universe. And inside the miniature — a series of cab rides — is in fact a portrait of his whole country.”
From a background article in
The New York Times by Rachel Doniado
★★★★
‘a beautifully humane fable… Taxi is a good-humoured jeu d’esprit, a piece of freewheeling cinephile activism, and a kind of career selfie’
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
'Charming, witty, politically lacerating'
Kate Muir, The Times
★★★★
'Enchanting, so funny and entertaining…exhilarating'
David Sexton, The Standard
'A great film, a funny film and — predominantly — a defiant film.'
Little White Lies
★★★★★
'Most disarming about Panahi's viewpoint is how deftly he succeeds in shifting gears from light comedy to serious national issues. One conversation with a lawyer - like the filmmaker, banned from her profession - goes from family small-talk to hunger strikes.'
Ed Frankl, Cinevue
‘“Taxi” is talking about something much bigger than Panahi’s own personal situation, but rather the dilemma of how to keep telling meaningful stories in a country that places so many prohibitions on an artist’s ability to express him- or herself. The result is a film of quiet but profound outrage, laughing on the surface, but howling in anger just beneath.’
Scott Foundas, Variety
... 'a tactful but potent political comment as well as a supple, entertaining dramatic exercise.'
Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice
'He presents us with an infinite regression of setups, touching on both his own movies and the difficulties for any filmmaker of addressing Iranian “reality.”
Richard Combs, Film Comment
'warm, teasing and eye-opening.'
Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter
'Structurally, Taxi is a marvel, but also as an entertainment, it delivers in every one of its 82 minutes.'
David Hudson, Fandor
'Jafar Panahi's 'Taxi' is a Unique Cinematic Masterpiece...[T]his longtime alchemist of reality and fiction appears in full command of an exciting new mode of filmmaking devised in answer to the stifling constraints on his creativity.'
Kevin B. Lee for Indiewire
'a delightful surprise... a priceless cinematic lesson, proving once again that if you know what you want and how to express it, the whole mystical paraphernalia of filmmaking and its inflated budgets is not really necessary.'
Dan Fainaru, Screen
'an embracing enjoyment of people, of traveling and seeing and hearing people... A supremely simple and direct film, it cuts you immediately and straight to the heart.'
Daniel Kasman, MUBI
'Taxi is a perfect complement to its predecessors, adding another chapter to Panahi’s exceptional and thoroughly stirring exercise in meta-filmmaking.'
Giovanni Marchini Camia,
The Film Stage
