When Asghar Farhadi's "A Separation" begins, a middle-class husband and wife in Tehran are arguing about her petition for divorce in front of an unseen judge. For a while the judge indulges their anger, which is compounded by hurt. "My finding," he finally says, "is that your problem is a small problem. Please sign here and good day." The judge is no fool. Neither is anyone else in this contemporary masterpiece from Iran; everyone has their reasons. But the couple's problem isn't small, at least not for them, and their ensuing separation opens up a succession of fissures, chasms and moral dilemmas that define an entire society.

Watch a clip of "A Separation" directed by Asghar Farhadi and starring Leila Hatami and Peyman Maadi. The film was Iran's official submission to the 2012 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language film. (Video/Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)

Thematic sweep and dramatic specificity are the movie's hallmarks, with the one always growing out of the other. The marriage is beset by fatefully conflicting circumstances. Simin, the wife, wants the family to seek a better life abroad for the sake of their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh. Nader, the husband, refuses to leave Iran; he's taking care of his father, who's impaired by Alzheimer's, and won't consent to Termeh living elsewhere with her mother. Soon the dire requirements of home care force Nader to hire a caregiver, Razieh, who comes to the task with her impish little daughter, Somayeh, in tow, and with religious strictures that contribute to a terrifying series of events in which the fabric of modernity is torn asunder and the line between truth and falsehood shifts and blurs.

(Before naming names, let me say that the members of the cast represent ensemble, naturalistic acting at its finest. They include Leila Hatami as Simin; Peyman Maadi as Nader; Sarina Farhadi—she's the filmmaker's daughter—as Termeh; Sareh Bayat as Razieh; Ali-Asghar Shahbazi as Nader's father; Kimia Hosseini as Razieh's daughter; and Shahab Hosseini as Razieh's husband.)

Leila Hatami as Simin in 'A Separation' Sony Pictures Classics

When admirers asked Mack Sennett how he went about creating his classic silent comedies, he would describe the basic principle as "One thing leads to another." Far from being a comedy, "A Separation" is an enthralling drama—with some kinship to "Kramer vs. Kramer"—and the subtitled Persian dialogue is fluent and copious. All the same, one thing leads to another with such ease and inexorable logic that the script could have been created by the filmmaker taking dictation from the people on screen. And as long as I've invoked the name of Mack Sennett, I should also note that everyone having their reasons is a maxim most famously enunciated by Jean Renoir, who might have recognized his own spaciousness of spirit in the film's generosity toward its conflicting and conflicted characters.

Simin has beauty on her side, though not always unvarnished truth when she's working her marital stratagems. Nader comes on as a hard case, slow to smile and quick to criticize; only gradually does he reveal warmth and humor, along with a willingness to fudge crucial facts when coming clean might court disaster that he doesn't deserve. The caregiver, Razieh, is a picture of piety—literally so, since she has the face of a Madonna—but the secrets she chooses to keep may destroy lives. The daughter, Termeh, watches and listens while seeking her own truth in what ultimately becomes a chastening story of her coming of age. Razieh's husband, Hodjat, emerges as the film's most frightening presence and yet, at one and the same time, its most compelling figure. He comes on as a religious fanatic, but what we learn about him illuminates, ever so affectingly, the fundamental separation in today's Iran between the secular bourgeois class and the religious working class.

"A Separation" reaches American screens—and joins the Oscar race as Iran's official entry—at a time of escalating tension between the two nations. What's more, one of Iran's most prominent—and provocative—filmmakers, Jafar Panahi, is currently in prison after the Iranian government sentenced him to six years of incarceration and a 20-year ban on any activities connected with making movies. Why, then, did the authorities put their stamp of approval on Mr. Farhadi's film? He was asked that question at last summer's Telluride Film Festival. "Censorship in a country like mine," he replied, "is a little bit like autumn weather. There may be rain in the morning, then sun later. I can only guess that my film came before the censors when the sun was shining. It may also have helped that I haven't judged anyone in it."

The latter point is essentially true, though he does pass one judgment in a way that may have escaped the censors' attention (or, for all we know about the internecine workings of a secretive government, may have been noted with tacit approval). In the film's intertwined wars—between the couples as well as the spouses—superior wisdom is clearly judged to lie not with either of the rigid, prideful husbands but with Nader's wife, Simin, who makes an impassioned plea for the peaceful resolution of both conflicts. Does that constitute an oblique comment on the state of affairs between two hostile states? Maybe yes, maybe no, but the main thing about Mr. Farhadi's film is vivid humanity. "A Separation" is its own shining light.

Watch a clip of Steven Speilberg's new film "War Horse," starring Jeremy Irvine. (Video/Photo: DreamWorks)

'War Horse'

Steven Spielberg has fashioned an impressive entertainment, and an occasionally stirring one, from source material with a singular pedigree—Michael Morpurgo's short novel, told from the horse's point of view, about courage and endurance in the face of horrific suffering during World War I. The book, couched in a spare style to engage young readers, owed its success to the power of imagination. So did Nick Stafford's stage adaptation, whose life-size equine puppets moved many theater goers to tears, sometimes in spite of themselves. The screen version, adapted by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, is a horse of a different aesthetic. It depends on our empathy for Joey—the gallant creature taken from a Devon farm to serve with British forces in France—but not so much on our imagination, since Mr. Spielberg and his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, supply a vast bounty of visual details. The result is a film that may stay in the mind's eye longer than it lingers in the heart.

Jeremy Irvine and the 'War Horse' DreamWorks Pictures

The production is never spare—the story starts with gorgeous vistas that evoke the Hollywood style of a bygone day—but the pace is agreeably leisurely at first. Jeremy Irvine makes a strong screen debut as Albert, the farm boy Joey must leave behind. Peter Mullan and Emily Watson are Albert's parents. The cast includes Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch. When the action moves to France, where millions of humans and horses alike are fodder for cannons, the battle sequences are less graphic than those in "Saving Private Ryan," but they make an eloquent case for the unspeakable bestiality of war and the nobility of wordless beasts.

'The Iron Lady'

Watch a clip from 'The Iron Lady,' a new film about the life of Margaret Thatcher, starring Meryl Streep. Clip courtesy of Weinstein Co.

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher is the main reason to see "The Iron Lady," which was directed by Phyllida Lloyd—not just the main reason but the raison d'être of an otherwise misconceived movie. By now Ms. Streep's gift for getting into her characters' throats is the stuff of legend; never mind that she's also a great actress. Channeling Julia Child was eerie enough, and funny in the bargain. This time she summons up the voice and spirit of Britain's former prime minister, both in Mrs. Thatcher's earlier years and clouded age, and the effect goes beyond eerie to phenomenal and authoritative. Close your eyes—or even keep them open—and the Iron Lady's time has come again.

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in 'The Iron Lady.' The Weinstein Company

In reality, of course, her time has not ended, though many years have passed since she was a figure on the world stage. At the age of 86, Mrs. Thatcher is living a private life in declining health, which raises the question of intrusiveness, if not outright exploitativeness, on the part of a movie that depicts her, in present tense, as severely diminished by memory loss, if not outright dementia.

Other sections of "The Iron Lady" find her in the fullness of her influence, or, more interesting still, en route to political power as a younger woman with a growing sense of her own destiny. But Abi Morgan's time-hopping patchwork of a script takes a blandly nonpartisan approach to one of the most controversial, as well as influential, politicians in British history. And moments of genuine poignancy, having to do with memories of love and the ravages of age, are diluted by the director's penchant for cinematic effects that play like repurposed Fellini. If only the film as a whole deserved the brilliance of its star.

DVD Focus
"The Circle' (2000)

Jafar Panahi's "The Circle," in Persian with English subtitles, is a stunning drama about the desperate state of women in Iran. That Mr. Panahi took on the censors is heroic. That he has been mercilessly punished for his convictions is unconscionable. "The Circle" presents fragmentary portraits of women as they'd never been seen in the modern Iranian cinema. Mostly they are women who have just gotten out of prison, for unspecified crimes, only to find themselves in the larger prison of a repressive society. The film is hard to find, but used DVDs occasionally turn up on Amazon.

'Offside' (2006)

Mr. Panahi's charming comedy falls between small and slight, yet takes on a big subject with great zest—not just the plight of Iranian women, but those who happen to be soccer fans and are excluded from the nation's stadiums, even though they may be equal to Iranian men in their passion for the sport. The heroines are a group of young Tehrani women who've been busted for trying to crash a World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain. The film's subtexts are the stupidity of authority, and the hypocrisy of discrimination. "Offside" is entertaining, and edifying to boot.

'The Bridges of Madison County' (1995)

Meryl Streep is Francesca Johnson, an Italian war bride whose fires are banked, in her middle age, but far from out. Clint Eastwood is Robert Kincaid, the still photographer whose waters run deep. Ms. Streep makes her character known in no time flat. Intelligence, humor, blocked ambition, self-irony—they're all contained in Francesca's quick response when Robert asks if she has any plans for the afternoon: "I was just going to have some iced tea and then...split the atom, but that can wait." Richard LaGravenese adapted Robert James Waller's outlandishly popular novella.