Nevermind Pop Film:
Certified Copy is an ingenious piece of work from writer/director Abbas Kiarostami. It’s essentially a 106-minute film of inquisitions – luckily for us, they are more than interesting. This is undoubtedly a provocative film. But it is not, despite a slew of shining positive attributes, a great picture.
Player Affinity writes: In recent years, there's been a big increase in the number of quality art-house films hitting theaters during the first half of the year. Last year, Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right carried their goodwill and relative box office success to Best Picture and Best Actress nominations. The year before, The Hurt Locker carried the same goodwill to a Best Picture win. And countless other films--Moon, Two Lovers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, A Prophet--earned distinctions on year-end best lists despite an early release date. In other words, December is no longer the only time an independent movie can succeed. Art-house cinema is a year-round enterprise, and in 2011, business has been booming. Here are some of the most respected indies of the year thus far, and their chances for Oscar recognition in 2012.
A profound film that draws the audience in not through plot, but through character, theme, and intellectual debate; a rare gem that encourages deliberation. Full review by Chris Pandolfi.
Empire Online: Impeccably photographed, philosophically provocative and mischievously rom-comic, Abbas Kiarostami’s non-Iranian bow is a simmering pastiche of bickering couple pictures from Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage To Italy to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. Using mirrors and shifts of perspective to ensure that nothing is as it seems, Kiarostami sends English academic William Shimell and French antique dealer Juliette Binoche on a Sunday odyssey to the Tuscan hilltown of Lucignano, where they debate originality, authenticity and value while keeping the audience (and themselves) guessing about the nature of their relationship.
