Blake Atwood's Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic is a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on Iranian cinema that introduces the politics of reform in Iran as an important prism through which to view the films produced during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997‒2005). Atwood's methodological approach consists of a fruitful integration of primary source material (such as Persian newspapers, journals, etc.), industry research, and film analysis. The author seeks to question and analyze the term “post-revolutionary Iranian cinema,” that has often been applied to all the films made after the revolution of 1979, by introducing the concept of reform cinema and thereby distinguishing the films that were made during the reformist era from those made in the first decade of the revolution. In this respect, the book is a welcome addition to the study of Iranian cinema that provides a historical and political contextualization of the Iranian films produced during this period, and stands well alongside other books that similarly set out to examine the politics of Iranian cinema such as Saeed Zeybdabadi-Nejad's The Politics of Iranian Cinema (2009), and Hamid Reza Sadr's Iranian Cinema: A Political History (2006).

In Reform Cinema in Iran Atwood makes two central arguments: first, he holds that there was a dialectical relationship between the way the reformist movement and the film industry helped to form one another, “and their interactions functioned on an ideological level” (p. 4). Second, he further argues that we cannot homogenize all the films that were produced after the revolution as “post-revolutionary Iranian cinema,” since the politics of the reformist era produced a brand of new films with their own unique set of aesthetics. Atwood theorizes a new set of “reformist aesthetics” that he argues are unique to the films produced during the reformist era and provides a list of these aesthetic forms that underpinned reform cinema, such as “mystic love, the use of Tehran as a metaphoric site of political and social reform, reconfigurations of perceptions of time, and the democratization of filmmaking with the use of video technology” (p. 23).

Reform Cinema in Iran is divided into five chapters, with each chapter broadly covering one of the aesthetic motifs of reform cinema in light of the politics of reform. In chapter 1 Atwood focuses on two films that used Sufi mysticism as a means to introduce a reformist logic into the revolutionary discourse of the Islamic Republic. He looks at Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film Time for Love (Nowbat-e ʿāsheqi, 1991), and Dariush Mehrjui's Hāmun (1990), as two instances in which the logic of mystic love was used by filmmakers to introduce certain reformist motifs and aspirations while maintaining a commitment to the ruling ideology (though this is less clear in the case of Mehrjui). Atwood demonstrates that the controversial debates surrounding Time for Love among conservative religious leaders and politicians on the one hand, with Makhmalbaf, the philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush and Khatami, on the other, revealed how the reformist discourse was articulated through its relationship and defense of the film industry and that the mystic aesthetic was a reformist strategy in this effort. An engagement with the work of Afsaneh Najamabadi and Cyrus Shamisa would have been helpful here. Whenever a director mobilizes the mystic aesthetic in their filmic text, it is inevitably haunted by the heritage of (homo)eroticism embedded in the language of Sufi poetry and Persian classical poetry, such as Hafez—which is why engaging the scholarship of Najamabadi and Shamisa would have been fruitful here. According to Atwood, Makhmalbaf mobilized the mystic aesthetic in the Time for Love by invoking Rumi and Hafez, and I would argue that his cinematic text is thereby haunted by this disavowed heritage. In fact, Atwood states that there was a backlash by the religious and political commentators, as audiences saw Time for Love representing illicit female sexuality (especially due to the film's portrayal of a married woman's extramarital affair). Makhmalbaf and the reformists (Soroush and Khatami) defended the film by giving it a mystic interpretation, an interpretation that Atwood accepts.

Chapter 2 looks at the way campaign films were permitted for the first time due to a new policy in 1997 and the filmic representations of Khatami during elections. Atwood discusses two films by the director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Under the Skin of the City (2000) and Our Times … (2002), which stages Bani-Eteimad's engagement and critique of the reformist movement through an analysis of her use of urban landscape and the use of documentary (p. 87). Atwood argues that before the election of Khatami political discourse largely remained off-screen and that these films effectively represented a critique of reform politics and participated in the democratic and reformist goals of the Khatami era. The author convincingly argues that in Bani-Etemad's films the topography of Tehran is structured around economic and class lines that highlight the differences in urban life experience (p. 90). Atwood sees Tehran as a metaphoric site for Iran's reformist politics and as a cinematographic location for the representation of reformist aesthetics.

In chapter 3 Atwood takes up the way video technologies (VCR, VHS, video recorders, etc.), which were banned in Iran from 1983 to 1993, became widely used in the Khatami era. Atwood looks at two films by Abbas Kiarostmai, Taste of Cherry (1997) and Ten (2002), and Bahman Farmanara's The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine (2000), as examples of new technologies such as digital video that represented a reform aesthetic that underpinned some of the themes of the reformist era, such as the democratization of filmmaking. In chapter 4 Atwood turns his attention to popular Iranian cinema to see how it was affected by Khatami's presidency. He compares Masud Kimiai's Protest (Eʿterāz, 1999), and Qeysar (1969) in order to see what happened to the tough-guy (luti) film genre. Atwood argues that through his film Protest, Kimiai effectively killed the figure of the tough-guy, and advocated a new form of masculinity in his hero, beyond the traditional masculinity of the tough-guy (played by Behrouz Vossoughi in Qeysar), by rendering the new hero into a contemplative sensitive man who is politically astute and reflects critically on reformist politics (pp. 137‒8). It is not clear however which reformist aesthetics informs the discussion and reading of Kimiai's Protest.

In the final chapter, Atwood examines Massoud Bakhshi's experimental documentary Tehran Has No More Pomegranates (2007), and the underground band Kiosk's music video Love of Speed (2007). Atwood argues that Bakhshi's film and Kiosk's video demonstrate that the aesthetics of reform cinema were operative beyond the politics of reform. For Atwood the experimentation represented in the film and video indicates that the reformist aesthetic had a creativity that enabled it to be deployed beyond the political movement that gave it birth. In the conclusion to the book, Atwood looks at the Cinema Museum (Muzeh-ye sinemā) in Tehran as a specifically reformist institution, and argues that the changes to cinema in Iran during the reformist era were not only aesthetic in nature but produced new institutional apparatuses (i.e. cinema journals, periodicals, etc.) that supported the film industry in Iran.

Reform Cinema in Iran is a thoughtful, well-conceived and well-written book that illuminates the mutual relationship between the politics of reform and the politics of Iranian cinema. Atwood combines his use of the primary source material and relevant theoretical literature and produces new insights through a rich synthesis of the two. Atwood's argument that the reformist era spurred the development of a set of reformist aesthetics in Iranian cinema requires further investigation through a consideration of other films that were produced during this period.

There is, however, one general problem with the overall approach of the book to the study of Iranian cinema. First it must be said that although I sympathize with Atwood's problematizing of the term “post-revolutionary Iranian cinema,” yet what should be problematized is the analytical merit of using political periodization or Khatami's presidency to delineate the course of Iranian cinema. In this sense, Atwood's argument is effectively reductionist, where everything in the production and reception of Iranian cinema during this period is reduced to the politics of reform or to Khatami's presidency. In the author's reading, the historical and political context of reform becomes the all-encompassing prism through which we are to view these Iranian films. This ignores the fact that cinematic texts as art can and often do exceed their historical and political contexts and could therefore be analyzed on their own terms. The history of Iranian cinema should not be conceived as a sub-category of political history in Iran but rather as a process of cultural production with exigencies and manifestations of its own. Therefore, to effectively reduce the films of the reformist era as a reflection of the politics of reform is a reductionist argument. Thus, a film theoretical perspective that places the filmic text at the center of the analysis would have benefited this study. In this way, the political and historical context of the films would have been drawn from inside the films, rather than from outside.

Finally, there are a number of minor typographical errs throughout the book (pp. 3, 40, 49, 81, 87, 104, 149, 169, 185, 186, 192, 216), including a missing citation (p. 141) that could be easily rectified in subsequent editions. There is also one factual error where Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848‒96) is erroneously said to have been responsible for bringing filmmaking technology to Iran (p. 172). However, the author later correctly states that it was Mirzā Ebrāhim Khān ʿAkkāsbāshi (1874‒1915), court photographer of Mozaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896‒1907), who brought film technology to Iran for the first time (p. 183). Despite these minor issues, Reform Cinema in Iran is an important and indispensable text for the study of Iranian cinema in the reformist era and beyond.