All of a sudden I became aware, or I remembered, that there is a better world somewhere else, that being in this one, where we were waiting for The Purge: Election Year to shock us, was a waste of the time allotted to me in this life and that, if I were going to see a movie, what time I have would be better spent with a form of cinema that acknowledges something other than the bloodshed and mayhem into which the world has fallen. The image of Homayoun Ershadi as the suicidal man in Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry came to me. It shook me awake. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I wanted out. I wanted to live.

The lights went down and trailers unspooled for a bunch of other movies, each one as dumb as the next, and then The Purge: Election Year began, and we sat there and watched it. Part of the time, at least, I saw it through the lens of Kiarostami, as if I were wearing glasses that made the film uglier. The rest of the time I just gave myself over to the movie’s sardonic portrayal of an out-of-control America led by murderous right-wing kooks, where foreign tourists put on Abraham Lincoln masks and kill the poor for fun.