Daily Archives: July 15, 2025

Films of the Decade: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

I’m not the only one to considar A.I. Artificial Intelligence [https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/11/a-matter-of-life-and-death-ai-artificial-intelligence-tk/] a very great and deeply misunderstood film; others as disparate as Andrew Sarris and the late Stan Brakhage have more or less agreed with me, as well as my friend and favorite academic critic, James Naremore. (Click the link above to read my full review.) But it’s also clear to me that any ordinary auteurist way of processing cinema can’t begin to handle this masterwork adequately: Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense — an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what’s human and what isn’t, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.

Published in Salon on December 14, 2009. Read more

Reflections on LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (2012) by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa

An expanded edition of my book with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, Abbas Kiarostami (University of Illinois Press, 2004), was published in Argentina by Los Rios, translated into Spanish by Luciana Borrini and Julián Aubrit. (A stil more expanded edition appeared in English much later, in 2018.) One of the two texts added to the Argentinian edition, my essay “Watching Kiarostami Films at Home,” is already available on this site, as are an essay about Shirin I wrote for the Cinema Guild DVD and an earlier dialogue I had with Mehrnaz about the film. Here is the other addition, written by Mehrnaz expressly for the expanded edition. — J.R.

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Reflections on Like Someone in Love (2012)

By Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa

LikeSomeoneinLove

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A phone conversation between Chicago (Saeed-Vafa) and Rome (Kiarostami), March 17, 2013:

Shirin

MS:  When you talked about Shirin in one of your interviews, you said that it was a unique film that could have changed your career, if you had made it earlier. What did you mean by that?

AK: I wished I had made Shirin earlier to get a better emotional understanding of women. Shirin was like a silent, wordless interview with 117 women. You could tell that they were all thinking silently about their private relationships, and we could see their emotions in their faces. Read more