The titles that win the Berlin Film Festival's top prize the Golden Bear are, by and large, pitilessly short on glamour. To be honest, they're not always that distinguished either. This year's winner, however, was very good indeed – but as spare and unembellished as kitchen-sink realism comes. Asghar Farhadi's A Separation is not one of those Iranian films that make up in dramatic intensity (like the works of censured director Jafar Panahi) or formal innovation (Abbas Kiarostami) what they lack in production frills. Rather, A Separation is a low-key, interior-bound drama that you could easily plaster with that damning label "TV movie" – except that TV these days rarely makes or transmits realist drama this intelligent, certainly not in Britain...a revealing picture of a society that most of us think of as radically different from our own – and yet, it becomes clear from the film that Iran is remarkably familiar when it comes down to certain painful universals. In Iran too, couples choose to split up; in Iran too, people suffer from Alzheimer's; in Iran too, there's class conflict arising from the gulf between privilege and deprivation. Farhadi's film tells us plenty about social relations in contemporary Tehran – but you may be struck by how much it tells us about ourselves too.[Jonathan Romney, Independent On Sunday]