C'est compliqué

Le passé (The past)

Crit

The opening scene, in which Marie (Bérénice Bejo) meets Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) at the airport, and the shot cuts between the two perspectives, each seeing but not hearing the other through security glass, could have been an hommage to the silent film that revealed Bejo to American audiences. Instead, it introduces an unnecessarily and uncharacteristically heavy-handed motif of communication aborted: in our efforts to know, too often we are reduced to guesswork, with inevitable results.

If you want something else to complain about, you might say that the plot, too, is unnecessarily complicated. But oh, what a plot, twirling back upon itself like a double helix, each twist revealing that what you thought you knew was not quite right, and making you wonder whether the same is true of what you just learned.

I'm not much inclined to complain, though, about this remarkable structure of love and denial and guilt and atonement and, most of all, truth and half-truth, lies and half-lies--oh, and email security. A worthy follow-up to writer-director Asghar Farhadi's A Separation.

Trailer

• Million Dollar Arm--I don't need to tell you how much I love a good baseball movie. I do feel compelled to tell you that this looks to be a steroidal slugger's moonshot away from being a good baseball movie. What a waste of Jon Hamm and Lake Bell.