Journey to Italy
In "The Hollywood Reporter", Deborah Young called "Certified Copy" "a delicate, bittersweet comedy". Young wrote that Binoche was given "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", and that Shimell's "elegant cool is very close to George Sanders'", referring to Sanders' role in "Journey to Italy". Peter Bradshaw of "The Guardian" was less impressed: "It is a film that is pregnant with ideas, and for aspiring to a cinema of ideas Kiarostami is to be thanked and admired. But the simple human inter-relation between the two characters is never in the smallest way convincing, and there is a translated, inert feel to the dialogue." Bradshaw rated the film with two stars out of five and said that it sometimes looks like "the work of a highly intelligent and observant space alien who still has not quite grasped how Earthlings actually relate to each other." David Denby of "The New Yorker" called the film "fascinating, beautiful, and intentionally enraging: a brilliant return to form from a director whose work, in the past, has joined modernist game-playing to ethical propriety and modesty." In a review of Kiarostami's next film, "Like Someone in Love", Denby further described "Certified Copy" as "nearly perverse in its ambiguity... an intricately conjoined double fiction, each tale uneasily reverberating inside its linked opposite." Stephen Holden of "The New York Times" compared the film to, and suggested it has drawn inspiration from, several European films from the 1950s and early 1960s, including "Journey to Italy", "L'Avventura" and "Last Year at Marienbad", as well as several films from the 1990s and 2000s: "In the Mood for Love", "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset".