The Circle

By RICHARD CORLISS

Iran has won international renown with films about children. Panahi made two of them: The White Balloon and The Mirror, about little girls stranded on the streets of Tehran. Now he reveals with unflinching sympathy how a female of any age can be lost in a man's world. The Circle is a dexterously constructed drama about one long night in the lives of half a dozen female ex-convicts in the Islamic republic, each of whom has been imprisoned, or may soon be, for such "crimes" as riding in a car with a man not her husband. This is a daring, despairing, beautiful work.

--By Richard Corliss