Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation, which opens today in NY and LA, still has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and a 92% rating from Metacritic.

“When admirers asked Mack Sennett how he went about creating his classic silent comedies, he would describe the basic principle as ‘one thing leads to another.’ Far from being a comedy, A Separation is an enthralling drama — with some kinship to Kramer vs. Kramer — and the subtitled Persian dialogue is fluent and copious. All the same, one thing leads to another with such ease and inexorable logic that the script could have been created by the filmmaker taking dictation from the people on screen.

“And as long as I’ve invoked the name of Mack Sennett, I should also note that everyone having their reasons is a maxim most famously enunciated by Jean Renoir, who might have recognized his own spaciousness of spirit in the film’s generosity toward its conflicting and conflicted characters.” –from Joe Morgenstern‘s 12.30 Wall Street Journal review.