| Avalon | Release Date: TBA | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
0
Mixed:
14
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews
AwardsWatchJun 5, 2026
Parallel Tales ultimately feels like a film that understands exactly how stories are built, but no longer believes in why they are told. Its ideas about perception and fabrication are precise, even elegant at times, yet they never harden into lived experience. What remains is a cinema of construction without consequence, where Farhadi’s usual moral pressure has been replaced by a fascination with form that rarely touches ground.
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The Film StageMay 16, 2026
Farhadi tries to be funny and Huppert occasionally makes it work (e.g. using a toaster to light her cigarette), but the comedic element is disparate and half-baked. Yet to Farhadi’s credit, his and Massoumeh Lahidji’s dialogue, which serves as the engine of moral ambiguity that powers the story, has the strength to keep one’s attention for the lengthy runtime if they’re able to invest.
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May 16, 2026
When Parallel Tales shifts tones near the end to unveil an unsettling surprise, the film’s confectionery construction cannot bear the jolt. Like Sylvie, Farhadi wants to mine riveting fiction from the flotsam of the everyday, but his imagination proves to be not as formidable as hers.
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The TimesMay 16, 2026
Screen RantMay 15, 2026
Parallel Tales is exactly as advertised: The central story interweaves the lives of six people in ways that should be a recipe for delicious, chaotic drama. Yet, Farhadi's latest is bogged down by its repetitiveness and refusal to offer anything new to a story about imagination and voyeurism. What we’re left with hangs a little too long onto a thin rope of painful repetition, false hope, and jaded screenwriting.
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