Average Rating: 8.3/10
Reviews Counted: 133
Fresh: 127 | Rotten: 6
Featuring gut-wrenching performances from Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu, 4 Months is a gripping portrayal of life in Communist Romania.
Average Rating: 8.8/10
Critic Reviews: 34
Fresh: 34 | Rotten: 0
Featuring gut-wrenching performances from Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu, 4 Months is a gripping portrayal of life in Communist Romania.
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Average Rating: 4/5
User Ratings: 24,371
Director Cristian Mungiu's drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days unfolds in Romania in the late '80s, during the last waning days of Communist rule. Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu play, respectively, Otilia and Gabita, two female friends and students who share a Bucharest flat. They soon find themselves saddled with an overwhelming problem: Gabita is expecting. With abortion illegal in Romania at that time, the women seek an illicit termination at the hands of one Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) in a
May 17, 2007 Wide
Jun 17, 2008
$0.9M
IFC First Take
All Critics (136) | Top Critics (35) | Fresh (131) | Rotten (6) | DVD (6)
Cristian Mungiu's masterful chronicle is impressive above all for the way it respects the audience, expecting them to follow the implications of its multifaceted tale without always spelling them out.
A brilliant and discomfiting film.
Proceeding with a blunt and sometimes brutal relentlessness, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days impresses and engrosses as a work of stark, spare naturalism.
Observes with ruthless, artful precision. While plunging a knife through your soul.
A powerful film and a stark visual accomplishment.
This is a beautiful film about ugly circumstances, set in 1987 near the end of the Ceausescu era in communist Romania.
This wrenching moral and social portrait of loss and violation represents another highlight of the New Romanian Cinema.
How it makes you feel depends little, if at all, about your position on abortion. The procedure acts as a MacGuffin for caustic commentary about Communist clampdowns and a friendship's annihilative death spiral through loyalty, desperation and sacrifice.
No one in Bucharest gives a damn about anything. And he takes 113 long, drawn-out minutes to send this bit of news.
Unrelieved gloom
Director Cristian Mungiu makes effective use of fairly static camera setups, in addition to some hand-held shots, to give the film a documentary feel.
Extremely powerful story about women dealing with illegal abortion issues in Stalinist Romania, but it is not a simple propaganda movie. In fact, it is a sublime if deeply troubling work of art.
For people who take their movies seriously, a quick course in Romanian might now be necessary -- and so is a trip to the theater to see 4 Months.
Grippingly horrible.
This is an unsettling film, brilliantly acted all around, most especially by Vasiliu and Marinca.
[A] brilliant, suspenseful, absolutely riveting film.
A relentlessly-depressing, slice-of-life drama which, perhaps a little too convincingly, palpably conveys the harrowing ordeal of a female desperate for an abortion in a country where the practice has been outlawed.
Better viewed as an illustration of the extreme dynamics of a friendship of personality contrasts than as a movie about illegal abortion or oppressive Communist regimes.
A stark, thought-provoking and disturbing insight into the harsh reality of life under the Ceausescu regime.
While other films may be just as engaging due to wit or sheer spectacle, few have ever been as affecting on an emotional level.
A good, realistic movie that, for my money, is a bit over-rated, and one that takes a long time to get you into the story. It's clinical for the first half-hour or more, but eventually, the stakes do rise, and through one gut-wrenchingly long dinner scene, you start to feel the urgency of the whole affair: Gabi needs
January 28, 2008Super Reviewer
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 days really reels you in with it's hypnotic voyeurism. It's brutal realism is uncomfortable viewing at times but is utterly captivating throughout. The long takes only emphasises how great the acting is, particularly from Anamaria Marinca in the lead role. The hotel scene is uncompromising,
May 4, 2011Super Reviewer
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