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100Though it's dominated by two people walking and talking, after a point it's as difficult to parse what's real and what's constructed in Certified Copy as it is in the home stretch of "Inception" (although "Before Sunset" and Roberto Rossellini's "Journey To Italy" provide closer models).
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91The end will haunt you.
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91A comedy of remarriage buried in intellectual abstraction and cinephilic obsessions, Certified Copy wanders a bit but never loses focus, with the only certainty being that its gimmick is genuine.
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90The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's delicious brain tickler, Certified Copy, is an endless hall of mirrors whose reflections multiply as its story of a middle-aged couple driving through Tuscany carries them into a metaphysical labyrinth.
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90Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.
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88In some ways, it's a simple character drama, but the central conundrum disallows an uncomplicated interpretation. I was never bored.
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88You can see her (Binoche) effect on Kiarostami's filmmaking: She brings out something new in him, too.
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88That this purposefully twisting exercise takes place amid the sun-burnished cypresses and towns of Tuscany - where ancient statuary is as commonplace as pasta and wine - only makes this playfully enigmatic meditation the more pleasing.
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88For me, it is too clever by half, creating full-bodied characters but inserting them into a story that is thin soup.
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88Literate and engrossing, with excellent performances.
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83A mental workout of the most invigorating sort.
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83Despite the film's coy artiness and a lassitude that sometimes passes for soulfulness, Certified Copy is strangely haunting.
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80Certified Copy isn't the masterpiece that "Close-Up" was, but it lures the viewer into a comparably labyrinthine thicket of fakeouts, doubles, and assumed identities. If you like movies that induce a pleasurable state of vertigo, this is one of the great discoveries of the year.
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80Her (Binoche) award-winning performance is reason alone to dive into such intellectual gamesmanship. (She can suggest an entire emotional arc with one facial tic.)
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Mar 7, 201180Binoche has a chance to display her noteworthy gifts as a comedienne, switching effortlessly from English to French and Italian to build a character that is resentful, manipulative and seductive all at once.
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75Although the film has elements of a puzzler by Michelangelo Antonioni and a psychodrama by Ingmar Bergman, it never becomes compellingly intellectual or unnervingly emotional.
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75Ultimately, Certified Copy – with its unresolved loose ends – is a puzzle box without a key.
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75Later, as the picture becomes a Petrie dish in which James' theories are put to the ultimate test, Certified Copy loses some of its magic, but it retains interest as an appealing and one-of-a-kind experience.
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Mar 10, 201170A sort of middle-aged "Before Sunrise" unfolds, meandering and talky. But from the get-go these characters' colloquy is a mutual provocation, not a romantic seduction.
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70More compelling as an intellectual exercise than an emotional one, Certified Copy finds deep-thinking writer-director Abbas Kiarostami asserting there's nothing new under the Tuscan sun, particularly not his own conventional romantic drama set in rural Italy.
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67The languages spoken throughout Certified Copy slide easily amongst Italian, French, and English, further creating the sense of none of them being authentic.
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Mar 10, 201160There's an enchanting, and very Western, musicality in Certified Copy, a mash-up that charms; Mad Decent - master masher, dj and producer Diplo's label - aptly describes it. (Diplo and Buñuel would've loved each other).
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60The romantic fable of love, marriage, art and second chances may not add up to all that much but the journey is exquisite.
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