“The Stoning of Soraya M,” is a fine new film directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh, and written by Nowrasteh and his wife Betsy, their script performed in Farsi with subtitles.   The title tells the story – a true story set in 1986 Iran – but it doesn’t convey the depth of insight that energizes the film.  I write about that – and the movie’s relationship to what’s happening in Iran now – in the Wall Street Journal this morning:

The movie’s detailed and unflinching depiction of a world and a worldview make “The Stoning of Soraya M.” a different kind of tragedy, what you might call a tragedy of culture or a tragedy of bad ideas.

The tragedy of bad ideas unfolds from a moral flaw in a worldview or philosophy as inevitably as classical tragedy unfolds from a flaw in individual character. Tragedies of bad ideas are the most common, pervasive and destructive man-made mass disasters. Yet our thinking class has become powerless to oppose them or even recognize them for what they are.

Read the whole thing here.

And read Andrew Breitbart on the same subject in the Washington Times here.

And see the film if it’s playing anywhere near you.  The performances are spectacular with a cast led by 24’s Shohreh Aghdashloo, a Persian actress with a voice like the sadness of time, and James Caviezel, who of course played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ and so seems to be making a habit out of starring in middle eastern language films about atrocities!  But he and Aghdashloo are brilliant here and so is just about everyone else in the picture.