Censorship made Jafar Panahi get creative. When the Iranian filmmaker was bestowed with the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, earlier this year, it felt like a celebration of Panahi’s doggedness during his years spent dodging and sidewinding an oppressive regime. Though “It Was Just an Accident” is Panahi’s first film not made under the explicit threat of legal retribution in years, it is just as incendiary as the work he made in the face of the direct ban on his filmmaking. Shot secretly in Iran and edited in France, far from its locale, his new taut black comedy-turned-thriller-turned-both ends up streamlining a political narrative at face value while pulling at every knotted thread along the way. Iran’s censorship of the arts, cinema included, didn’t begin with but was heightened by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which imposed limitations upon filmmakers to uphold the purity of religion in their art, lest they besmirch the regime. Panahi’s filmmaking was born into thi...