Ten

This Abbas Kiarostami film, often considered one of the most important films in recent cinema, is a fascinationg, intense, uncomfortable, difficult (even agonising at times) to watch, and at times very moving film.
It is ten scenes, 'shot' from a fixed camera inside a car. They relate to the driver, who in each case is a woman in her mid thirties with a difficult, though not super-dramatic in the classic cinematic way, family life.
The opening scene is clausrophobic and absolutely horrendous. Next to no horror films can build up and twist this sense of nastiness, difficulty, power, and on the viewer's part wish to completely not be there.
As the scenes move on we get wonderful character sketches, without too much ever being given away. The woman who plays with her face, though again uncomfortable to look at, certainly has a quality. Kiarostami does not make it easy, we don't get simple conclusions from watching the way the people act (or indeed hearing). But we do get a sense of real people, who we try to understand.
The scene with the prostitute as it once unsettling, interesting, and occasioanlly moving. The laugh of the woman, her subverting what seems the intial terms of the excahnge; all fascinating, innovative.
There are moments of light in this film. We have a tenderness to some of the later mother-son events that, though on a knife edge and never to be concluded, are fascinating. It is little moments of comradeship that give this film its light.
That said, it is cluastrophobia and tenseness that form the heart of this film. Don't expect hyper-beauty, we have some nice uses of light, but this is much more about the actors than the background settings. This requires the viewer's engagement, a high level of concentration, to understand the people, rather than to wallow in anything. A film that makes demands on the viewer.
As far as ideas, we are never given didacticism, but only super-real portraits of what actual people think. This is a feminist film not in how the ideas are given, but in how we are seen the women's point of view (note how the camera's staying still takes the power from the male director and gives it to the female actors) and enter a world we are often excluded from in the cinema world.
A brave, powerful, creatively innovative film, that refuses to hand anything on a plate and makes the viewer engage and work for the pleasures and intense moments of comradeship that are there. An important film, one that will last long in the mind, and one that took us to places that cinema all too often ignores. Terrific work.