Here’s some free advice for any movie characters out there: If you ever happen to stumble upon a random bag full of money — and it’s not much of a stretch to assume that you might someday — the very first thing you should do is look up and check if the opening credits are still floating in the air nearby. If you see the words “directed by Peter Farrelly,” you might be in for a pretty good time and an even better tuxedo. If you see the words “directed by Joel and Ethan Coen,” I regret to inform you that you’re already dead. But in the event that you should come across a sudden windfall only to turn your smiling head to the heavens and see the words “A film by Asghar Farhadi” painted in white letters against the blue skies of Shiraz, well… there’s really no telling what you should do, only that you soon won’t be able to tell if you did the right thing. As one character ruefully observes in Farhadi’s latest film: “Nothing is free in this world.”

Epitomized by the heart-wrenching uncertainty of 2011’s “A Separation,” Farhadi’s social melodramas begin with straightforward predicaments that are peeled back — layer by layer, and with deceptive casualness — while the hard bulb of a moral crisis is revealed deep underneath. His stories are better described as dilemmas, and those dilemmas unfold with the frustration, resolve, and steadily increasing ferocity of a cat batting a tethered ball to itself around a pole until the string is stretched tight enough that everything chokes to a standstill.

Farhadi plays to his strengths with “A Hero,” as he takes a classic premise and spins it around and around and around with enough centrifugal force to keep you rooted in place even as your sympathies fly in every conceivable direction. By the time this expertly constructed ethical clusterfuck finally slows to a stop, the simplest film that Farhadi has made since his international breakthrough 10 years ago has somehow become the most ambivalent, and also the best (although making such a pronouncement with certainty seems almost antithetical to the spirit of a movie that obliviates your judgement at every turn).

~this review continues on IndieWire~