The Salesman

Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman (Forushande) won Best Screenplay and Best Actor (Shahab Hosseini) at Cannes in 2016, and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017, Farhadi's second Oscar in the category after A Separation. He stayed away from the 2017 ceremony in protest at the Trump administration's executive order banning travel from Iran, and his absence became one of the clearest political statements of that year's awards season.

A young Tehran couple, Emad and Rana (Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti), have to leave their apartment when the building begins to subside. The flat they move into still holds the belongings of the previous tenant, a woman whose profession is disclosed only gradually. One evening Rana is assaulted there by a stranger, and she refuses to call the police. Emad, an English-literature teacher rehearsing the title role in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, starts an investigation of his own, and the marriage begins to buckle under the questions he asks.

The cleverest idea in the film is the parallel between Miller's play, with its ageing American salesman going under, and the domestic catastrophe building at home. Farhadi found his territory of contemporary Iranian middle-class moral drama in About Elly and perfected it in A Separation. Here he works it at its most compressed and its most emotionally exposed, with every scene doing double duty on stage and off.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Farhadi's most precise chamber drama, and one of the great recent films about how grief and humiliation can corrupt decent men. Hosseini's Cannes-winning performance, all pride and wounded dignity, is among the most devastating of 21st-century cinema.