Timely exposé of the plight of women under the Taliban. The narrative peg -- an exiled Afghan journalist sneaking back into the country to reach her sister before the latter's pre-announced suicide in concert with the final eclipse of the 20th Century -- may be overly contrived and corny, and the acting might often be stiff and awkward, and the first-person English narration a little rudimentary and remedial, but the glimpses of the people and their culture reveal the eye of an artist, namely the eye of Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf: the classroom where young boys are drilled simultaneously in the Koran and in weaponry; the communal clothes-washing by veiled women around a village well; the examination room in which a doctor and his female patients are separated by a blanket with a silver-dollar-sized hole in it (the African-American doctor, a figure of compassionate liberalism on screen, is in real life, you might have heard, an accused Islamic assassin); and the Red Cross outpost where land-mine victims line up, after a year's wait in some cases, for their prosthetic limbs. The capper to this last scene: the crowd of impatient patients hopping and hobbling on crutches to catch up with the sets of false legs lowered to earth on parachute strings. One could only wish Buñuel had lived to see it. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd