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Maybe Dom Cobb is a metaphorical name like Ariadne or Mal, other characters in this turgid crowd-pleaser, and I just didn’t know what the significance was. A lot of people who have seen it will tell you that Inception is one big metaphor — a movie about making movies, about how movies work, about w…

Watching a movie in a movie theater is an act of collective loneliness. Shirin makes that loneliness cathartic, but by not showing the film within the film, Kiarostami avoids transforming it into entertainment. The power of our individual response to entertainment is itself the film’s subject. The …

Staying in Iran after the revolution and making films nowhere else for over two decades, however, meant Kiarostami was able to continue the work he had started in the 1970s, which concentrated on children, classroom life, families, domestic spaces, and the aftermath of natural disasters, all the th…