Metacritic reviews

While visually scrumptious, the movie struggles to reach a greater profundity that it never quite obtains, but its childlike emulation of a grand tragedy is indelibly precious.

Both winsome and sophisticated, Chicken with Plums unfolds like a rich Persian carpet woven of memories and nostalgia in a colorful fantasy Iran of 1958, twenty years before the Islamic Revolution turned the country to somber grays.

You have no idea what's coming next, except that it will be wildly creative and beautiful. These two know how to mix up a very unusual and successful cinematic recipe.

The result is captivating, but not exactly moving: Nasser-Ali's grand passion is posited rather than communicated, in spite of Mr. Amalric's exquisitely soulful performance.

A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.

The same winning balance of seriousness and humor that made "Persepolis" such a hit works equally well in Chicken With Plums.

Sit in the front – and don't peer too hard – and Chicken With Plums casts an undeniable spell. It is bold, exotic and distinctive, particularly during the animated angel of death sequence.

There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.

The evocation of passionate love is palpable, what with Amalric's sad longing and Farahani's Nobel Prize–winning face and everything, and the honest undercurrent of melancholy keeps the whole thing from becoming unmoored.

Fortunately, Chicken With Plums does have its pleasures, including Isabella Rossellini as the silkily jaded mother.