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Police, Adjective
Metascore
81 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 23 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 21 out of 23
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 23
  3. Negative: 0 out of 23
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  1. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
    100
    It's not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming bits of minutiae, the more familiar (and amusing) it'll seem.
  2. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    100
    The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.
  3. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    100
    A simultaneously realistic and absurdist examination of police work.
  4. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    100
    Yet another outstanding little movie in the exciting Romanian New Wave.
  5. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    100
    Police, Adjective is a deadly serious as well as dryly humorous analysis of bureaucratic procedure and, particularly, the tyranny of language. Images may record reality, but words define it.
  6. Variety
    Reviewed by: Jay Weissberg
    100
    Porumboiu is one of the few helmers working today who so completely understands both the power of language and the power of visuals.
  7. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    88
    This cunning and provocative Romanian film requires patience, but its rewards are many: It's hard to imagine how a scene in which a police captain barks an order to bring him a dictionary can be loaded with suspense, but, really, it is.
  8. St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    Reviewed by: Joe Williams
    88
    Although it's sly and sardonic, Police, Adjective is as rigorous as a tea ceremony -- or a Stalinist re-education camp.
  9. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    83
    A clever, exceedingly wonky procedural about a undercover cop (Dragos Bucur) who quietly refuses to do what he's told.
  10. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    83
    This intermittently terrific cerebral thriller does, indeed, hinge on the proper use of dictionary definitions, but the film is really about the oppressive blahness of small-town, postcommunist Romania. In such surroundings, parsing definitions can almost stand for high drama.
  11. Empire
    Reviewed by: David Parkinson
    80
    A riveting slice of Romanian new wave drama, haunted by shadows of the Ceausescu era and never less than thought-provoking.
  12. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    80
    Police, Adjective may not be the film you're expecting, but it's one that will stay on your mind.
  13. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    80
    So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book.
  14. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    80
    The movie is simultaneously a police procedural, an analysis of language and imagery, a philosophical debate about law and justice, and a very, very dry Romanian Martini--so dry that, at first, one doesn't quite taste much of anything.
  15. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    80
    The climax, in which the detective's commanding officer gives him a dictionary and subjects him to a sort of linguistic browbeating, is a marvel of dead air and unspoken oppression.
  16. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    78
    Though formally astringent, Police, Adjective is dotted with lots of humor.
  17. NPR
    Reviewed by: Mark Jenkins
    75
    Police, Adjective has considerable power, and the issues it raises linger in the mind.
  18. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    75
    Its surprisingly effective key scene involves an argument with his captain over the dictionary definitions of the words "conscience" and "justice." This may not sound exciting, but it was welcome after legions of cop movies in which such arguments are orchestrated with the f-word.
  19. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Walter Addiego
    75
    Director Corneliu Porumboiu ("12:08 East to Bucharest"), with his deadpan style and probing intelligence, is someone to keep an eye on. Using a minimalist style, and possessing the courage to risk alienating his viewers, he has created a movie full of resonance.
  20. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    75
    Like a dark-comedy sequel to the masterful German film "The Lives of Others," Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective gives viewers a penetrating glimpse of surveillance culture, in this case as it plays out in post-communist Romania.
  21. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    75
    For all the inactivity and resistance that mark the plot, there's beauty in the filmmaking and a kind of dazzling inevitability to the unwinding of the tale.
  22. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    50
    The movie comes on like a put-on--next to nothing happens for an excruciatingly long time--and ends as a fascinating dialectic between following one's conscience or following the law.
  23. Time Out New York
    Reviewed by: Joshua Rothkopf
    40
    Shockingly dull.
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