After creating a prosperous life in Iran, a Jewish family may be forced to abandon everything before they are consumed by the passions of revolutionaries as a revolution looms on the horizon.
This lifeless, by-the-numbers production is an excruciating exercise in cliche and tedium. Its sole joy is in trying to figure out which of its leads is overacting most.
...captures what it must be like to have your life suddenly turned around into total chaos, the hopelessness, the helplessness, and the despair that descends when thrown into a dungeon where people all around you are being executed on a daily basis.
Heavy with earnest good intentions but too underpowered and oddly packaged to deliver the emotional gut punch its subject demands, Septembers of Shiraz is a disappointing misfire.
This autobiographically inspired tale of a wealthy Jewish family in Tehran suffering under Iran's shift to fundamentalist Islam, which played in print as hard-hitting but nuanced, now feels like a simplistic, somewhat pandering melodrama.
