Taste of Cherry · reception & legacy
1997 · Abbas Kiarostami
How Taste of Cherry has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It shared the Palme d'Or in 1997 — the first Iranian film to win it — yet split critics immediately: Roger Ebert gave it one star and called it excruciatingly boring, sparking a famous printed feud with Jonathan Rosenbaum, who championed it. Now it's a fixture of the Sight & Sound greatest-films canon and shorthand for Kiarostami's genius.
What's debated
It's the ultimate slow-cinema litmus test — transcendent minimalism or an emperor's-new-clothes endurance exercise — with the Ebert-vs-Rosenbaum feud still relitigated in Letterboxd reviews, and the ending its own eternal argument.
Its footprint
The image of a Range Rover winding through dusty Tehran hillsides while a life-or-death conversation unfolds in the front seat became the defining icon of Kiarostami's 'car cinema' — a trope filmmakers and critics have referenced ever since.
Where it stands
A load-bearing pillar of the arthouse canon: the 'you must have seen this' entry point to Iranian cinema and the film slow-cinema devotees cite to sort the committed from the curious.