Justin Chang

Most of those passengers want Iqbal dead, but none of them can be 100% certain he's the guilty party, and they bicker relentlessly about what to do next.

As deadly serious as everything is, Panahi pushes the action and the banter to often farcical extremes.

He's made a road movie in which the characters keep going around and around in circles.

It's startling just how funny It Was Just an Accident can be.

It's attuned to the comic futility as well as the horror of the situation.

there's an especially dry running gag, in which Vahid finds himself forced to bribe various people, from security guards to hospital nurses.

A jab at the banal everyday corruption of life under an oppressive system.

As day bleeds into night, it was just an accident builds to a dramatic climax of lacerating emotional force.

A sequence so intense, you can practically feel Panahi's rage burning a hole through the screen.

His movie, in weighing the question of revenge versus mercy, is an obvious warning to authoritarian regimes everywhere.

But it also feels like a warning to people living under those regimes.

Several weeks ago, I moderated a Q&A with Panahi in Los Angeles, a city he hadn't visited in almost 20 years.

While we were talking before the Q&A...

Panahi turned to me with a grave look on his face and said, I'm worried about your country.

Paul Thomas Anderson is one of Hollywood's great time travelers.

He took us to turn-of-the-century oil country in There Will Be Blood, the 1950s London fashion world in Phantom Thread, and the 70s San Fernando Valley, twice, in Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza.

One battle after another is Anderson's first film in ages set in the present day.

And partly for that reason, it grabs you and even smacks you in the face in a way that his other movies haven't.

It's a prescient, mesmerizing, frequently hilarious, and fearlessly political piece of work.

It's also an action thriller, staged on an epic canvas, with harrowing gunfights, daring rooftop escapes, and poundingly visceral car chases, including one staged on a rolling desert highway that must be seen to be believed.