Beautiful City (2004) poster
2004 · drama · iranian

Beautiful City

Directed by Asghar Farhadi1h 41m2004
ElsewhereIMDb7.66kRT92%Metacritic69TMDB7.768
  • sombre
Movie DNA

Sombre, steady, measured drama / iranian, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

Akbar, 18, has been held in a rehabilitation centre for committing murder at the age of sixteen. Now, Akbar is transferred to prison to await the day of his execution. A’la, a friend of Akbar, tries desperately to gain the consent of Akbar’s plaintiff so as to stop the execution.

Our read · Beautiful City (2004) reads as a sombre, steady, grounded drama · iranian entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

Where the cast leads
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The shape of Beautiful City

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a morally complex Iranian drama about justice, forgiveness, and the death penalty.

ends ambiguousit stays with yousteady all the waygrips by minute 12attention 4/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upsuicide theme

Skip it tonightSkip if open-ended stories about capital punishment and tough choices will unsettle you.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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