A Separation is the first great film of 2012. The fact that a small Iranian film, by a filmmaker relatively unknown even in international circles, can snag an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay speaks to its remarkable universality.

You could say this movie makes a mountain out of a molehill, I suppose, but what a glorious mountain it is. The "molehill" is a very specific legal case in present-day Iran, a dispute between a secular middle-class man and the Muslim woman he's hired as a caretaker for his elderly father. The "mountain" is the movie-long culmination of that case, a culmination which ends up touching the lives of so many, many others, including the man's separated wife, their earnest 10-year-old daughter, his Alzheimers-stricken father, the Muslim woman's religiously strict and out-of-work husband, and their mischievous 4 year-old daughter. Each of these characters is so nuanced that, despite their furious disagreements with each other, we in the audience can empathize with them all.

A Separation starts small and even stays small but it develops its smallness to such a degree that it ends up feeling enormous in its scope, as it delves into the inevitable conflicts (and separations) between law, religion, personal ethics and social mores.