Everybody Knows's reviews
Media reviews
Indiewire
It?s a taut setup that risks veering into soapy territory, but Farhadi reveals just enough involving details to pause at individual moments and rest on more intimate observations.
The Guardian
Iranian director Farhadi opens Cannes with a film that explores the unhealed wound at the heart of a Spanish family with pitiless efficiency and sheer muscular flair.
Variety
"Meanwhile, the real intrigue arises on the margins, as Farhadi explores the suppressed history between Paco and Laura. This is where he excels as a director, and though the film is slow to reach a place where its revelations can have an impact, once that starts to happen, it becomes compulsively absorbing".
The Telegraph
Farhadi?s screenplay does an artful job of keeping vital fragments of each of its characters secret until the very end. But the climate of over-determined melodrama is rather less involving: characters synopsise their grievances so often, and so thoroughly, that many pivotal scenes have the corny texture of a ?previously, on last week?s show? clip reel.
The Hollywood Reporter
If the film remains largely watchable it is because Farhadi has cast some of the finest actors in Spain and they know how to breathe life into their characters even when they don?t have all that much to do (though a few of them have quite a lot to say).
Fotogramas
"We could say that Farhadi's hand goes with some topical symbolism (that dove that escapes), and that the film had won shortening those scenes in which the actors give themselves with the externalization of their feelings, for the benefit of a more exciting rhythm".
El País
"From something so enigmatic and unsettling, Farhadi displays his sentimental power to talk about the past and the indelible mark that it can cause in those who suffered it or enjoyed it (or both), from the chasms of pain and loss that can hide behind the apparent normality, uncertainty and fear, the need to find guilty, sordid complicity, that appearance and reality can maintain an ancestral war, secrets difficult to confess".
ABC
"Then, the intrigue, the "thriller", soon eats the joy (a girl disappeared), but the melodrama is eaten in turn to the "thriller" ... Brush strokes from one gender to the other that have the singularity, yes,to be pregnant both with the gigantic subtlety of this director: the suspicion moves between the characters as stealthily as a cat, and the successive "discoveries", that past that Farhadi manages with the lightness of a blow of hair in a shampoo advertisement, but also with the force of a baseball bat, it makes the plot dance, and it is the moment of Penelope Cruz, Bardem, Darín and Bárbara Lennie...".
El Mundo
"Perhaps, to sharpen the trial, the tape is not as obsessive and emotionally crystalline as his best work, but returns to present an analysis of the lie, reconciliation with it and the distorted memory as captivating as painful".
La Razón
"It may be that the Iranian filmmaker does not judge his characters, but by submitting them to the formulas of the genre - the Latin melodrama, the kidnapping thriller - he ends up putting them in evidence. If the film aspires to unfold, in its ambitious chorality, like a serial that functions as a clockwork mechanism, it fails in the verisimilitude of its plot turns, in the characterization of some secondary characters (that ridiculous retired policeman who plays José Ángel Egido) and in the domain of their times, between the overdose of incidents and their insane redundancy".