Certified Copy (2010)

The film is a resplendently heady yet nimble essay on art, life, landscape, and love whose emotional feeling proves it a certified copy of real life. It singles out Binoche’s profoundly emotional and philosophical consideration of mortality and loneliness in the scene watching an old couple.

The critic praises the film as a delicious brain tickler and endless hall of mirrors, a metaphysical labyrinth about a middle-aged couple driving through Tuscany. He singles out the erudite debate on artistic authenticity and the way the story multiplies reflections on copies, originals, and identity.

The film is a thrilling exploration of fluid identities and relationships that becomes intensely real despite its artifice, with tactile emotion, shocking anger, tenderness, and devastating epiphanies. It singles out Binoche’s dissolving performance in long takes and the director’s skill at car scenes.

The critic calls the film mysterious, paradoxical, and deeply ambitious, a lovely manifesto on freedom and the bonds of self and marriage. He singles out its portrayal of the eternal return and the aesthetic value of the copy, along with its sensual and conceptual delight in light, reflections, and shifting identities.

The film is a philosophically provocative and mischievously rom-comic pastiche of bickering couple pictures, using mirrors and shifts of perspective to keep the audience guessing about the central relationship. The leads respond splendidly to Kiarostami’s playful mockery of arthouse and mainstream clichés.

This is Kiarostami’s most commercial film to date, a captivating divertissement that marries post-modern reality games with mature romantic comedy in a breezy, thought-provoking package. It conforms on one level to Hollywood genre conventions while remaining smartly Euro-friendly and targeted beyond hardcore cineastes.

Kiarostami delivers a challenging, ambiguous and moving film that requires intellectual engagement with its decontextualised relationship fragment. Binoche and Shimell deliver superb performances with off-kilter chemistry, though the central role-play premise rings slightly false.

The film is an engaging return to narrative cinema, a delicate bittersweet comedy set in romantic Italy that slyly explores marriage and the ways men and women fail to think alike. It features strong performances from Binoche and Shimell but is too offbeat for wide audiences.

The unresolved ambiguity around the couple’s relationship makes the film feel empty, though it represents a strange turn for the director. Juliette Binoche is fantastically engaging and gives the film its heart, while the rigorous camerawork and naturalistic soundtrack remain great pleasures.

The film offers poetic and cinematic beauty but little emotional gratification or investment in its characters. It questions authenticity through its central couple's interactions in Tuscany but leaves audiences frustrated by its elusive approach.

The critic describes the film as a baffling, contrived and bizarre deconstructed portrait of a marriage with unconvincing human relations and inert dialogue. He praises Kiarostami's ambition in aspiring to a cinema of ideas but finds the overall effect strange and unreal.

Kiarostami executes a simple premise with brilliant elegance in this character study of a couple whose shared past gradually reveals itself, resulting in a funny, moving, intellectually absorbing and emotionally rich film. The script’s raw realism and the lead performances, especially Binoche’s, are singled out.

The review finds the film hits on all levels, delivering a picture that is complex both formally and emotionally and showing why Kiarostami’s feature absences were sorely missed. It singles out Binoche’s performance for giving the film real emotional impact amid its intellectual games and narrative loop.

The film is a subtle, experimental take on romance and authenticity, using ambiguous realism and lengthy conversations to explore meaning, observation and unreliable narration. Binoche and Shimell deliver strong performances, though the wordy two-hander may not satisfy mainstream viewers seeking clear answers.

The reviewer found the film enjoyable as an accessible arthouse entry with strong direction and a clever central concept about authenticity, though it remains an acquired taste due to its slow pace and unanswered questions. Binoche’s performance and the use of mirrors/reflections in the Tuscan driving scenes stand out for praise.

Kiarostami delivers a thoughtful but cinematically inert two-hander full of lengthy conversations about love, originality and relationships that feels more suited to theatre than screen. Binoche and Shimell are strong with convincing chemistry and ambiguity, but the film stimulates the mind without touching the heart, leaving it chilly and distant.

The review calls the intriguing premise a disappointment that fails to become the gem it could have been, weighed down by leaden early dialogue, excessive slowness, and a wooden performance from Shimell. Luca Bigazzi’s cinematography of the Tuscan locations receives praise for its beauty and immediacy.