The festival and art house crowd might be excused for declaring a Romanian New Wave on the basis of what amounts to just three films in as many years, for those three films are all pretty amazing: Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, winner of the 2005 Un Certain Regard at Cannes; Corneliu Porumboiu’s […]

The funniest movie I’ve seen all year is a satire on the state of public discourse in Romania. No wait, come back! Please? A fost sau n-a fost?, or 12:08 East of Bucharest to us Yanks (the original title translates, I believe, as Was It or Wasn’t It?, making this one of the exceedingly rare […]

The Zero Years is a fucked-up movie. I recognize that “fucked-up” is not a recognized term in film criticism, so I should probably elaborate on that a little. The opening: black screen. After a moment, there is a deep synthesized bass note. Pause. Another. Pause. The score expands a little without moving out of the […]

For all that I bitch about the tedious movies that I see these days, I do live just one short el ride from the second-best art movie market in North America. Sure, a lot of what gets into art theatres is crap nowadays, but lo and behold I actually saw something like a masterpiece on […]