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Critics Consensus: Smart, visually arresting, and scathingly funny, Aferim! depicts a world that many American filmgoers have never seen -- but will still, in many respects, find utterly familiar.
Critic Consensus: Smart, visually arresting, and scathingly funny, Aferim! depicts a world that many American filmgoers have never seen -- but will still, in many respects, find utterly familiar.
All Critics (40) | Top Critics (18) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (1)
The tone is Rabelaisian and earthily comic in the minimalist, picturesque squalor of the settings.
With a title that translates roughly as Attaboy!, this engaging and percipient period comedy focuses on the enslavement of the Roma people in 19th-century Romania.
Somehow director Radu Jude's decision to film in black-and-white only heightens that sense of reality: It's as if the film is some ancient newsreel.
Shot in stark black and white, the picture's sense of place and time is strong - pungently so.
It's a tough world out there, and Costandin has found a way to survive in it. It's not always pretty, but in "Aferim!" it's never less than interesting.
Shot in black and white with fade-out transitions, the movie harks back to classic westerns. But it's also distinctly modern.
Yet another film about how superior we are to those awful racists from the 19th-century.
Aferim! is the opposite of a cultural celebration. It uses startling, hilarious misanthropy to portray Eastern Europe's immoral legacy - a hapless, dissolute, pusillanimous culture that has bequeathed the region a cynical present.
Although he's taking on a complex historical time...Radu Jude has made a very entertaining film...Marius Panduru, shooting long takes in b&w 35mm, achieves the illusion of a mittel-European Western rediscovered decades after its release.
Jude keeps his camera at judicious distance, but its grit sets it apart from the stern minimalism of most contemporary Romanian filmmaking.
A boisterous black-and-white Romanian faux-western should not, by rights, be this funny, this jaw-droppingly well photographed, or this incisive in its depiction of society and history.
A twisted history lesson whose messages transcend its insular time period of 19th-century Romania.
Radu Jude crafts this visually classic Western in black and white with a camera that seems to glide in wide-angle long shots, and uses a comical - and curiously theatrical - approach to show the racism and sexism of a time that doesn't seem so distant from modern Romanian society.
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