Best movies like Critical Zone

A look at the reasons why every year 70,000 Iranians have a nose job.

A tax collector is accused of taking bribes, and also has to deal with problems at home, including a suicide attempt by his wife.

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

The story revolves around a blind boy named Mohammed who is released from his special school in Tehran for summer vacation. His father, shamed and burdened by Mohammed's blindness, arrives late to pick him up and then tries to convince the headmaster to keep Mohammed over the summer. The headmaster refuses, so Mohammed's father eventually takes him home.

Wounded by the police, a thief looks up his old friend in order to leave the proceeds of his theft with him. Instead, he finds that his friend is a drug addict. He sticks around to try and help his friend kick the habit; instead, both men are caught in a shootout with the police and...

Samad is nobody’s fool. The narcotics officer has seen his share of a drug dealer’s lies and games, and his patience has come to run thin. While searching for the infamous drug baron Nasser Khakzad, he and his colleague Hamid scour the streets of Tehran, turning an overcrowded prison on its head. With his rough and dubious approach, Samad finally manages to find the criminal’s whereabouts – but things do not quite go according to plan...

A wealthy Iranian family struggles to contain a teenager's growing sexual rebellion and her brother's newfound conservatism.

A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.

A yellow cab is driving through the vibrant and colourful streets of Tehran. Very diverse passengers enter the taxi, each candidly expressing their views while being interviewed by the driver who is no one else but the director Jafar Panahi himself. His camera placed on the dashboard of his mobile film studio captures the spirit of Iranian society through this comedic and dramatic drive…

Ali is son of a well-off family who plays the santoor (an Iranian instrument) and has earned some reputation through his concerts and teaching music but is rejected by his family because of this profession, which they despise. He falls for one of his music students but after a short blissful period, life doesn't treat him as well as before and also his addiction agonizes him in his numbered days before redemption.

The Glass Agency is the story of a war veteran living in post war Iran. It depicts veterans who are suffering from social problems after the war. Society does not understand them and the standard social norms are not in harmony with their personalities.

Inspirational true story of Iranian dancer Afshin Ghaffarian, who risked his life for his dream to become a dancer despite a nationwide dancing ban.

Dokumentation about the Journey of Patrick Allgair and Gwendolin Weisser, they travelled over 100.000 Kilometres on foot and by hitch-hiking. Starting in Freiburg, Germany they start travelling East, it took three and a half years and they came through Ukraine, Russia, China, Japan and Mexico on their way around the world.

Golrokh, an Iranian author, struggles to settle her husband's debts caused by a business partner who left him to bear the consequences.

Two victims are graphically tortured in this American reimagining of the popular underground Japanese film series.

This is the story of Tehran from the Qajar time (middle of 19th century) to today. Tehran has become a metropolis from a small village, now a developed city with many social problems.

Parkway is a crossing in Tehran. Part horror, part thriller, the film chronicles the tribulations of a young couple, Raha and Kouhyar.

Marzieh is a young female actress living in Tehran. The authorities ban her theatre work and, like all young people in Iran, she is forced to lead a secret life in order to express herself artistically. At an underground rave, she meets Iranian born Saman, now an Australian citizen, who offers her a way out of her country and the possibility of living without fear.

The lives of three strong-willed women and a young musician cross paths in Tehran’s schizophrenic society where sex, adultery, corruption, prostitution and drugs coexist with strict religious law. In this bustling modern metropolis, avoiding prohibition has become an everyday sport and breaking taboos can be a means of personal emancipation.

A visual social examination in the form of ten conversations between a driving woman and her various pick-ups and hitchhikers.

Three young criminals are ordered to keep a girl inside a house until her brother pays his debts.

Emel works at Osman's club. There she meets Kemal and they fall in love. They decide to get married. Kemal's man Mahmut, gets Kemal into a pretended drugs business and causes Kemal to go to Tehran. Kemal writes letters to Emel but they are kept by Mahmut and Emel never sees them. Mahmut calls Kemal to Istanbul.

A young taxi driver who is a happy man encounters lots of different stories through his daily life. One day, he is driving a young American woman and he enters an unusual and protracted adventure which he should follow to the end. The American woman has lost the address she is going to refer and it is almost impossible to reach her relatives. The young driver believes that he should help the woman until she finds her relatives and this issue causes many problems between him and his fiancee. He also has other problems regarding the American woman and his unusual friend.

The story is about a family of three brothers and a sister in the suburbs of the city's poverty. Their elder brother owns a drug-producing kitchen and presides over the group, like a shepherd for sheep.

It’s 1988 and, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran is bombed relentlessly. The days that pass are full of foreboding, and yet, love, affection, hope and life itself manage to sweep away the fear of death from those surrounded by it. Love may often be difficult to comprehend, but death is a horrible certitude. ‘Bomb, A Love Story’ shows how, even when faced with the darkness of death, love and hope will find a way.

The hard daily life of a kid working in a photo shop while trying to get closer to the girl he likes.

After her divorce Mina is in need to financial and emotional supporting. She meets a guy and thinks that this is the man of her dreams. But things are not just as their first seem to be.

Tehran's air pollution has reached maximum levels because of thermal inversion. Unmarried 30-something Niloofar lives with her aged mother, and stays busy with her alterations shop. When doctors insist that her mother must leave smoggy Tehran for her respiratory health, Niloofar’s brother and family elders decide that she must also move away to accompany her mother. Now Niloofar is torn between family loyalty and living her own life. As the youngest she has always obeyed their orders. Can she stand up for herself this time?

A young woman's wedding becomes a ritual of mourning when her sister and family die in an auto accident on the way to the wedding. The sisters' mother refuses to accept her daughter's death, and in the midst of wedding guests and mourners, including the drivers of the truck that caused the accident, she orders the wedding to take place. But how can the daughter marry in the midst of a wake and without the family's traditional mirror, which the sister was bringing to the service?

Hamid and Mahin are husband and wife and are traveling to the north by their car. But in the way they have an accident with a rural woman. Unlike his wife's disagreement Hamid decides to escape the scene and lives the woman to die but it is only the beginning of his troubles.

In Tehran 1916 during first world war a group of patriots make a punishment committee to punish the traitors. With the lead of Abolfatooh Mirza, Reza Tofangchi begins the assassinations.

The story is about a doll named Amo Pumble who teaches children how to live in society by reading a magic book to children.

The fates of a madman, a homeless woman, a print shop worker and a playboy are intertwined in the days leading up to Persian New Year. Toofan, an uncategorisable film which moves freely between horror and comedy; documentary, musical and sci-fi, was the first production of Khachikian’s own studio, Azhir Film. After the censor banned Khachikian from making a film about the first serial killer of the modern era in Iran, he turned to one of his own stories, exploring his preferred themes of compassion and evil. Shot both in the studio and on location, it features a memorable sequence of Bonfire Wednesday and a ruin which was rumoured to be a former Qajar era torture dungeon.

A group of anti-revolutionary monarchists based in Paris plot the overthrow of the Iranian government, with the help of powerful but shadowy American forces. They are arranging for the gradual smuggling of components into Iran to build a small nuclear weapon, for which they use eleven mules, each carrying a different part. The plan is that one week before the International Atomic Energy Agency is to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities, they will detonate the bomb near a famous sports stadium in Tehran in order to cause mayhem and mass destruction and discredit the Iranian government. Written and directed by Behrouz Afkhami, from a story that is loosely based on the novel The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth.

Banafsheh, a young prostitute who has fled with a man to the seaside in hope of starting a new life has to return to her profession as she learns about the betrayal of her lover. Penniless and emotionally broken, she also has to bear with the taunts of the other girls and the threats of the roughneck patron of the house, Mammad who unfailingly refer to his dagger to consolidate his supremacy. In fact it was Mammad who ordered the man to rob Banafsheh of her money and abandon her. Banafsheh apparently has not learnt her lesson, as she trusts her next customer and falls in love with him. Her new lover , Abbas, is a truck driver who received his nickname for his habit of constantly lying, but it seems that he gives it a break when promises Banafsheh to get a house of their own...