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100You just don't expect Hollywood to produce a masterwork so early in the new year. And it hasn't. This slice of celluloid dynamite comes from Romania, and what you see will floor you.
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100This is a powerful film and a stark visual accomplishment, but no thanks to Gabita (Laura Vasiliu). The driving character is her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who does all the heavy lifting.
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100The result is a mixture of unified atmosphere and lived-in character study, and while Vasiliu’s role is not as indelible as that of her co-stars, Marinca’s Otilia and Ivanov’s steely abortionist are just about perfect.
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100Brilliant, suspenseful, absolutely riveting film.
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100This year’s foreign language Oscar scandal – there is always at least one – is the snub of director Cristian Mungiu’s disturbing, masterful realist drama following two college roommates as they carry out plans for one’s black market abortion in Communist Romania.
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100First, this movie should be enjoyed. Later, marveled at. And then, once the excitement has faded, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days really should be studied, because director Cristian Mungiu creates scenes unlike any ever filmed.
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100The film is bold stroke that hopes to push Romanian society forward by staring into the dismal failures of its recent past.
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100Writer-director Cristian Mungiu confirms the Romanian cinema renaissance while creating a paradoxical marvel: a bleak tale of illegal abortion that powerfully affirms one's faith in people.
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100A remarkably engrossing and thoughtful picture, beautifully rendered in an artful mode of realism.
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100Tense, kinetic, intelligent and real – as if Paul Greengrass had remade Vera Drake.
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100A grueling and deeply affecting human drama.
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100Nothing good happens in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the riveting, horrifying chronicle of an illegal abortion performed in 1987 when Ceauescu's dictatorial hand still gripped Romania's throat. And yet no lover of greatness in filmmaking will want to look away from one of the very best movies of 2007.
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100Without a single gunshot (and just one flick of a switchblade), it turns into an existential suspense film with the highest stakes imaginable: the survival of the human spirit.
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100Despite their terrible ordeal these women are heroes, not victims. As Mungiu makes clear in the casual, brilliant final scene of this amazing movie, heroes persevere.
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100Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in the last gasp of Nicolae Ceausescu’s iron-fisted regime, it’s no metaphor, but a sordidly visceral transaction conducted in the next best thing to a back alley.
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100Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is one long premonition of disaster.
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100This is a film with a commitment to reality unlike any we're used to seeing.
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100It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.
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100One of the strongest movies in recent years.
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100Pitch perfect and brilliantly acted, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a stunning achievement, helmed with a purity and honesty that captures not just the illegal abortion story at its core but the constant, unremarked negotiations necessary for survival in the final days of the Soviet bloc.
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100Elegantly crafted, brilliantly acted film.
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100In a truly great movie the form becomes indistinguishable from the story, and that’s certainly the case here.
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1004 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant).
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100The New Wave of Romanian cinema is the most exciting in the world right now. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is its latest masterpiece.
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90The coup de grâce is especially graceless because everything we know is already visible in Marinca’s eyes. The actress is extraordinary.
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90A beautiful and formally compelling work of art.
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90Anamaria Marinca delivers an utterly transfixing performance as Otilia, a young woman who helps a friend (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal abortion in the waning days of Romania's communist Ceausescu regime.
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88It is filmmaking as it should be but usually isn't.
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88Depressing and gut-wrenching, but always powerful and gripping.
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88Despite being slow and deliberate, it is often compelling and occasionally riveting. As "The Lives of Others" was in 2007, this is the first memorable movie of 2008.
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88Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."
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83A grueling film in both technique and subject matter.
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80The film is dark, gloomy and without music, but it is also observant and highly suspenseful, with Mungiu using his often static camera to balance banal cruelty with simple generosity.
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80This is a tale of friendship, corruption, betrayal and desperation masterfully told without an ounce of filmmaking flash and with an unflinching commitment to realism.
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80Mungiu’s pacing is so sure, however, in its switching from loose to taut, and the concentration of his leading lady so unwavering, that the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels more like a thriller than a moody wallow.
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A curious filmgoing experience: Virtuosic, assured, and possessed of undeniable aesthetic force, it’s also hard not to turn away from.
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63It makes "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "12:08 East of Bucharest," the last glum Romanian movies about life under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, seem merry.