Certified Copies

In beautiful Tuscany, Kiarostami (“Taste of Cherry”) brings together Cannes winner Juliette Binoche and William Shimell for what begins as an ordinary conversation between two strangers. Slowly it becomes a romance in which truth and illusion grow harder and harder to tell apart. — A British writer arrives in Tuscany to present his book and give a lecture, and an art lover, hoping for a worthwhile conversation, leaves him her number so they can meet later. Their first conversation is awkward, but it slowly grows warmer and more intimate, until a café owner takes them for a couple fifteen years into their marriage. Neither of them corrects her. Could it be they already know each other? — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2010 Best Actress (Juliette Binoche) | Cannes Film Festival | 2010

In his most abstract, poetic and mystifying film, Krzysztof Kieslowski creates a masterful riddle-poem and a grand audio-visual composition about art, fate and the duality of existence. — Two women with the same name, face and characteristics live thousands of miles away from each other. Sharing the same passion for music and the same serious health condition, their lives are connected in an unexpected and metaphysical way. — Best Actress (Irène Jacob) | Cannes Film Festival | 1991 FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1991 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1991

Three years before “Drive My Car”, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi brought to Cannes a pop romance that works as a tender variation on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”. Asako is in love with one man yet can’t take her eyes off another, and the same actor plays them both. — Asako falls head over heels for Baku, who drifts into her life without explanation and disappears just as suddenly. Two years later, while working at a café in Tokyo, she meets Ryohei, a salesman for a sake company who has her lost love’s face, and they start building a life together. Baku, meanwhile, has become a model, and now he looks down from posters all over the city. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2018 Official Selection | San Sebastian International Film Festival | 2018

Here is everything we love David Lynch for: a man convicted of a murder he can’t remember becomes someone else entirely, in what may be a new life or only a new dream. Patricia Arquette plays a double role, Angelo Badalamenti supplies the music, and it’s hard to imagine anything more Lynchian. — Videotapes start turning up on the doorstep of a jazz saxophonist and his wife, filmed inside their house while they slept. Before long he’s convicted of killing her, a murder he has no memory of, and while he waits to die in his cell he somehow turns into a car mechanic living an entirely different life. Once the mechanic is set free, their paths begin to cross.

Chaplin had kept silent on screen for years, and the voice he finally found in 1940 was aimed squarely at Hitler. He made the most humane film of his career as a satire of a world with five more tragic years still ahead, and it ends by reminding us that we think too much and feel too little. — Adenoid Hynkel rules Tomania and means to rule a great deal more. A Jewish barber, meanwhile, comes back to the ghetto after twenty years in a military hospital, unaware that anything has changed, and when he reopens his shop he gets in the way of stormtroopers who have come to smash its window. Chaplin wrote, directed and plays both men, because the dictator and the barber have exactly the same face. — Nominated for Best Picture | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Charles Chaplin) | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Jack Oakie) | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1941 Nominated for Best Original Score | Oscars | 1941