Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis directly confronts the political via the personal. Recounting her early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood living in (and out of) Tehran in the years following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Satrapi's books bleed history, their raw confrontation of the monumental, tumultuous changes that swept the country during the '80s and '90s drenched in intimate, inflamed, and often unpleasant memories and emotions. They're stunning works of exposure, and thus it comes as little shock to discover that Satrapi's cinematic version of her stories—co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud—radiates brutal honesty. A hand-drawn 2D triumph produced in France by the country's few remaining traditional animators, and shot primarily in black-and-white, Persepolis feels ripped straight from its creator's heart, a sore, scathing, warts-and-all account of her formative years bolstered by its formidable aesthetic inventiveness, and elevated to the near-apex of its art form by its unguarded sincerity.