Color of Paradise, The

An 8-year-old student at a Tehran school for the blind (Mohsen Ramezani) goes home to his mountain village for the summer, but his widowed father (Hossein Mahjoub) is about to remarry and doesn’t want him around. Writer/director Majid Majidi’s film is awkwardly paced, dawdling over lyrical moments, then bounding clumsily to the middle of the next scene, and it often risks tedium. But Majidi will not be rushed, and he imposes a kind of primitive, sinister rhythm on the action, like Grimm’s fairy tales before they were tidied up for kids. His actors (including Salime Feizi as the boy’s grandmother and Elhma Sharifi and Farahnaz Safari as his sisters) have an almost uncanny beauty, and the photography is exquisite (the irony of stunning visuals in a film about a blind boy is no doubt intentional).