John Michael McDonagh’s “The Forgiven” walks the ever-fine line between artful examination and utter monotony. Adapting Lawrence Osborne’s novel, McDonagh’s film takes place over one weekend in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco and skewers the privilege of the wealthy and white.

David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastain) are traveling to a party taking place in the Moroccan desert. Late, lost

Wes Anderson’s "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is the cinematic equivalent of a pastry: beautiful, exquisitely-crafted and so immensely enjoyable that it seems too good to be real. Part-homage to pre-World War II Europe, part-tribute to memory and the passage of time and part-ridiculous slapstick, "The Grand Budapest"'s greatest achievement is not in its visual perfection but its literary sensibility. It’s what would

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The separation itself is somewhat of a MacGuffin and does little more than set all the pieces in motion. The most we hear about marital disputes is in the tense opening scene, a single static shot that shows the spouses pleading their cases, from the perspective of the marriage clerk’s desk. Simin explains that she wants to take their eleven-year-old daughter to study and live abroad. Nader insists on staying behind to tend to his Alzheimer-afflicted father.

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