Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–1994), Close-Up (1990), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Taste of Cherry (1997), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year.

He was part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave, a Persian cinema movement that started in the late 1960s and emphasized the use of poetic dialogue and allegorical storytelling dealing with political and philosophical issues.

[8] Kiarostami had a reputation for using child protagonists, for documentary-style narrative films,[9] for stories that take place in rural villages, and for conversations that unfold inside cars, using stationary mounted cameras.

[10][12] In 1970 when the Iranian New Wave began with Dariush Mehrjui's film Gāv, Kiarostami helped set up a filmmaking department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in Tehran.

Intent on attending a football match in far-off Tehran, he scams his friends and neighbors to raise money, and journeys to the stadium in time for the game, only to meet with an ironic twist of fate.

In addressing the boy's determination to reach his goal, alongside his indifference to the effects of his amoral actions, the film examined human behavior and the balance of right and wrong.

The part-documentary, part-staged film examines Sabzian's moral justification for usurping Makhmalbaf's identity, questioning his ability to sense his cultural and artistic flair.

[30] Critics such as Adrian Martin have called the style of filmmaking in the Koker trilogy as "diagrammatical", linking the zig-zagging patterns in the landscape and the geometry of forces of life and the world.

The film contrasted rural and urban views on the dignity of labor, addressing themes of gender equality and the benefits of progress, by means of a stranger's sojourn in a remote Kurdish village.

[citation needed] A. O. Scott in The New York Times wrote that Kiarostami, "in addition to being perhaps the most internationally admired Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, is also among the world masters of automotive cinema...He understands the automobile as a place of reflection, observation and, above all, talk.

"[42] That summer, he directed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Così fan tutte conducted by Christophe Rousset at Festival d'Aix-en-Provence starring with William Shimell.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian describes the film as an "intriguing oddity", and said, "Certified Copy is the deconstructed portrait of a marriage, acted with well-intentioned fervour by Juliette Binoche, but persistently baffling, contrived, and often simply bizarre – a highbrow misfire of the most peculiar sort.

[citation needed] Though Kiarostami has been compared to Satyajit Ray, Vittorio De Sica, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Tati, his films exhibit a singular style, often employing techniques of his own invention.

For the image by means of which, each time, each opens a world and precedes himself in it (s'y précède) is not pregiven (donnée toute faite) (as are those of dreams, phantasms or bad films): it is to be invented, cut and edited.

[58]In other words, wanting to accomplish more than just represent life and death as opposing forces, but rather to illustrate the way in which each element of nature is inextricably linked, Kiarostami devised a cinema that does more than just present the viewer with the documentable "facts", but neither is it simply a matter of artifice.

[62] Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, of the University of Maryland, argues that one aspect of Kiarostami's cinematic style is that he is able to capture the essence of Persian poetry and create poetic imagery within the landscape of his films.

In several of his movies such as Where is the Friend's Home and The Wind Will Carry Us, classical Persian poetry is directly quoted in the film, highlighting the artistic link and intimate connection between them.

One scene in The Wind Will Carry Us has a long shot of a wheat field with rippling golden crops through which the doctor, accompanied by the filmmaker, is riding his scooter in a twisting road.

While acknowledging substantial cultural differences, much of Western critical writing about Kiarostami positions him as the Iranian equivalent of such directors, by virtue of a similarly austere, "spiritual" poetics and moral commitment.

[22][65][66] Kiarostami, along with Jean Cocteau, Satyajit Ray, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Derek Jarman, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, was a filmmaker who expressed himself in other genres, such as poetry, set designs, painting, or photography.

On the other hand, the succinct allusion to philosophical truths without the need for deliberation, the non-judgmental tone of the poetic voice, and the structure of the poem—absence of personal pronouns, adverbs, or over-reliance on adjectives—as well as the lines containing a kigo (季語, a "season word") gives much of this poetry a haikuesque characteristic.

[67] Kiarostami's three volumes of original verse, plus his selections from classical and contemporary Persian poets, including Nima, Hafez, Rumi and Saadi, were translated into English in 2015 and were published in bilingual (Persian/English) editions by Sticking Place Books in New York.

[79] Mohammad Shirvani, a fellow filmmaker and close friend, quoted Kiarostami on his Facebook wall on 8 June 2016: "I do not believe I could stand and direct any more films.

Iran's representative office at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO also opened a memorial book for signature to honour Kiarostami.

Media, such as The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Independent, Associated Press, Euronews and Le Monde also reacted to Kiarostami's death.

[citation needed] Artists, cultural authorities, government officials, and the Iranian people gathered to say goodbye to Kiarostami on 10 July in an emotional funeral, six days after his death in France.

[86] Attendees held banners with the titles of his movies and pictures of his most famous posters, as they praised the support Kiarostami contributed to culture, and particularly to filmmaking in Iran.

The ceremony was hosted by famous Iranian actor Parviz Parastooie, and included speeches by painter Aidin Aghdashlou and prize-winning film director Asghar Farhadi, who stressed his professional abilities.

[102][103] The festival director, Richard Peña, who had invited him said, "It's a terrible sign of what's happening in my country today that no one seems to realize or care about the kind of negative signal this sends out to the entire Muslim world".

Ben Gibson, Director of the London Film School, said, "Very few people have the creative and intellectual clarity to invent cinema from its most basic elements, from the ground up.