The Human Resources Manager Reviews

The long, long journey that makes up the bulk of the film is bizarrely undramatic.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

If director Eran Riklis's intention is to show the blossoming humanity, so to speak, of a human resources manager, the transformation is much too subtle to work.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

It's hard to say if the film is aiming for a political critique of the dynamics of the everydayness of suicide bombings in Israel and the country's poor treatment of its immigrant population, or if that's just the way we read anything "Israel."

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

But The Human Resources Manager is not really about guest workers-instead, like the Magical Negroes so beloved of certain American filmmakers, they exist only to help members of the privileged classes get in touch with their humanity

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10

Even with incidents involving drunken locals, an underground bunker and a decommissioned tank, the film doesn't build the comic momentum of good intentions hurtling downhill in a strange land.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

A disappointingly shallow story in which only the dead are named, and the living are reduced to stereotypes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

The goal is allegory: the result is a yawn.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Ivanir's acting is the key - he portrays the transition without sentimentalizing his character.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

After we die, where should our bodies spend the rest of eternity, and does it even matter? Eran Riklis' Israeli parable The Human Resources Manager deals with these questions in a darkly-comic - yet still totally affecting - manner.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

A light drama with some tilts towards droll comedy, The Human Resources Manager is ultimately a very humanist film, offering a commentary on the way modern life has become so regulated and routine.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Riklis captures and inspires a sense of character and regional authenticity in his work, just as he did so wonderfully with The Lemon Tree. But there is also a nagging degree of contrivance with this film.

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Surprising, humanistic tour through the detritus of global disorder with a motley individuated crew on an odyssey in a bleak, stormy landscape from Israel to ex-Soviet bloc.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10

A sometimes serious, sometimes quirky road movie sees an HR Manager travel from Jerusalem to Romania with a dead body, a collection of strange characters, and a slowly developing conscience about the fate of the dead.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Like a great short story, it begins with a simple situation and then convinces you it has told you everything important about it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Deftly steering between politics, poignancy and dark humour, this absorbing road movie is also one that proves morally interesting.

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With its bitter sweet centre, this unusual road movie combines the incongruous, the bizarre and the unexpected

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Although the story is relatively simple, it is studded with complex themes and unexpected elements which make it rich and layered ... a surprisingly uplifting film, without ever turning away from the harsh realities of its elements

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It's a lovely film, a compassionate one that has a sense of humour about the world of Eastern Europe and yet a respect also. Four stars from me.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

[A] well-made piece we must admire, even if it doesn't grab us by the heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

A title infused with an irony encapsulating this bittersweet and darkly laced satire. And a murky odyssey into euphemisms that tend to define the universal workplace, where humane gestures more often than not protect the bosses, rather than the workers.

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