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The closing ceremony brought about a sigh of ‘I knew it’ disappointment as this year’s quasi-unanimous favourite “Toni Erdmann” failed to pick up a single award, while “I, Daniel Blake”, a mawkish feel-bad movie, so utterly predictable and artistically vapid, so tedious that it is hard to hate but is instead best watched as a bland medicine, took home the top prize. The 2016 jury seems to have inherited their forerunner’s perverse pleasure in rewarding a film nobody cared for much. Well done on managing to outrage the minuscule segment of humanity that gives a rat’s tail about Cannes palmarès.

The subaltern at Cannes (i.e. the press) do get the need to the Jury to leave their stamp of originality, and though they supposed to not read any reactions on the films in competition, they nonetheless seem to take a childishly perverse pride in stumping ‘predictions’. By now,...

Written by Zornitsa Staneva

Following in the wake of Woody Allen’s chirpy Hollywood comedy “Café Society”, Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada, the Romanian opening of the official competition feels like a product of a wholly different planet and art form. As soon as the opening sequence various cinematic categories can be facilely slapped on “Sieranevada”: a filmmaker’s film, “art house” at its bleakest and most minimalist, a three-hour long cinéma-vérité experiment in a shabby post-communist apartment…

All of the above are certainly applicable and from the outset the film’s premise is to demand the audience’s patience, a lot of it. We will be served a concoction of never-ending naturalistic dialogue set in the kitschy, shabby apartment of a Bucharest grandmother whose husband has recently passed away; a heavy dose of Romanian funerary culture; the lingering ‘afterglow’ of Romania’s communist regime; some intermittent comic-relief references to...

Sierra-Nevada

Director: Cristi Puiu

Writer: Cristi Puiu

Romanian New Wave master Cristi Puiu, has been almost absent from the cinema scene, whose memorable sophomore effort, 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu won the Un Certain Regard award and became one of the signature titles of that film movement. His less celebrated but equally assured follow-up was 2010’s incredibly bleak Aurora. Since then, he quietly unleashed a terrific 2013 feature Three Exercises of Interpretation, which was one of the best films we saw that year, but it sadly is still without distribution. At the tail end of 2013, Puiu announced two projects in development, the first being Sierra-Nevada. The project received funding from Eurimages and completed filming in March of 2015. The film concerns “a commemoration that never gets to take place,” as Puiu describes it, and its characters escape into fiction when overwhelmed by a grief they cannot understand. Inspired by Aurel Rau’s poem The Agathirsoi.

Exclusive: Punjab-set drama Fourth Direction to premiere in Un Certain Regard.

Elle Driver has picked up Indian director Gurvinder Singh’s tense Punjab-set drama Fourth Direction (Chauthi Koot) ahead of its premiere in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard.

Set in the Indian state of the Punjab at the height of the separatist Sikh uprising in the early 1980s, the film captures the atmosphere of fear and paranoia of the period and the impact of the violence on ordinary people.

Singh intertwines two loosely connect incidents, an attempt by two Hindu friends to get to the city of Amritsar, home to one of the holiest shrines in the Sikh religion, and a farmer who is told to put-down his barking dog.

It is a second feature for Singh after his debut picture Alms for a Blind Horse, which premiered in Venice in 2011.

Elle Driver has strong links with India’s independent film scene, having previously...

★★★★☆ Romanian director Radu Muntean's intensely observed domestic drama Tuesday, After Christmas (2010) is about the end of a marriage and the start of an affair. Paul (Mimi Branescu), a well-off, middle-class Romanian living in Bucharest has to make a choice between the two women he loves. Happily married to Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), Paul has also fallen for a younger woman Raluca (Maria Popistasu), his daughter's orthodontist.

Read more »...

Tuesday, After Christmas

Directed by Radu Muntean

Romania, 2010

Patient, affecting, and rewarding, Tuesday, After Christmas, is easily identifiable as an entrant into the Romanian New Wave.

Paul (Mimi Branescu) is in love with two women, his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), also the mother of his daughter, and Raluca (Maria Popistasu), their younger, more attractive dentist. With Christmas rapidly approaching, Paul’s infidelity becomes more difficult to bear, to the extent that he must decide between the two.

This is kind of like Scenes from a Marriage were it to be crosscut with an unmade sequel Scenes from an Affair. Shot like most of the major films coming out of current Romania, Tuesday, After Christmas is high-key, with real-time scenes, and ordinary locations. Dealing with social situations but in a less gruesome, urgent manner than its peer 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Muntean’s film cuts infrequently. There is no coverage within a scene to speak of,...

Each week within this column we strive to pair the latest in theatrical releases to worthwhile titles currently available on Netflix Instant Watch. But this week, we’re taking a break from our regular format to wrap up our Year-End 2011 coverage by offering the very Best of 2011′s Now Streaming releases, as determined by the Tfs Staff.

Kicking off our Best of 2011 picks is Tfs President & Managing Editor Dan Mecca, who braved theaters this year for better or worse to review such big releases as Jack and Jill, Fright Night and Captain America, has filled his Top 10 list with daring debuts, spectacular sophomore efforts, and stunning masterworks from some of cinema’s most celebrated auteurs. His picks here are alternately quirky and insightful.

Ceremony (2010) An Honorable Mention on Dan’s list, Max Winkler’s offbeat comedy also earned a spot on our Top 10 Directorial Debuts for, “Operating with a level...

"Romanian films set in the era after the fall of Communism suggest the nation suffers a hell of a hangover from the ideology," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "For instance, Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective attacks draconian drug laws left over from the old regime. Tuesday, After Christmas presents a very different vision of Romania. Its characters can afford to buy expensive Christmas gifts; one of them picks up a 3,300 Euro telescope. It may not be entirely accurate to call the film apolitical, but the most political thing about it is its avoidance of Eastern European miserabilism and its depiction of people who could be living much the same lifestyles in Western Europe."

Damon Smith introduces an interview with director Radu Muntean for Filmmaker: "Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty,...

The following is a reprint of our review from the New York Film Festival in 2010. For those wondering when the absurdly consistent Romanians would falter, well, consider their first middling effort to be Radu Muntean's "Tuesday, After Christmas." Paul (Mimi Branescu) is having a joyful affair with his daughter's orthodontist, Raluca (Maria Popistasu), whom he plans to leave his wife for. Before she departs the city of Bucharest for the holidays, she tells him the next time they see each other will be — you guessed it — the Tuesday after Christmas. Now, without an escape from real life's…...

[Editor's Note: Lorber Films is releasing Tuesday, After Christmas at the Film Forum today -- this interview originally took place back in October of 2010. Additionally, here is footage from the world premiere night in Cannes back in May of 2010.] It was on a Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending a reception hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute of New York to honor directors Cristi Puiu and Radu Muntean, actors Mirela Oprisor, Mimi Branescu, producers Bobby Paunescu and Dragos Vilcu, and DPs Tudor Lucaciu and Viorel Sergovici. The event was a celebration of the three selected films at the Nyff: doc film The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the pair of narratives, Aurora and Tuesday, After Christmas. It was great to meet and talk with all of these filmmakers because they are truly at the forefront of one of the most exciting movements in international cinema, still relevant and vibrant since Cristi Puiu's Stuff and Dough and Cristian Mungiu's Occident landed in the Cannes' Director's Fortnight editions of 2001 and 2002. Late last week, I had the even greater pleasure of interviewing the team behind the Un Certain Regard selected Tuesday,...

Too often in the movies, affairs are either blithely romanticized in the grand European tradition of middlebrow “passion” films (The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes to mind) or used as a teaching tool to bludgeon audiences into accepting a damning moral perspective on the consequences of extramarital activity. (See Little Children, for instance.) Life has its own current, though, and the nature of relationships sometimes follows a pattern that is chaotic and irrational, messy and perturbing, where the boundaries between love and naked contempt (ah, Godard!) are no longer discernible. Movies from Voyage to Italy all the way down to Maren Ade’s Everyone Else have portrayed intra-relationship dynamics with emotional honesty and astute insight, leaving us with memorable impressions of love in a state of deterioration, or foundering on the shoals of time. In his fourth feature film, Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean (Boogie, The Paper Will Be Blue) again...

It was on a Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending a reception hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute of New York to honor directors Cristi Puiu and Radu Muntean, actors Mirela Oprisor, Mimi Branescu, producers Bobby Paunescu and Dragos Vilcu, and DPs Tudor Lucaciu and Viorel Sergovici. The event was a celebration of the three selected films at the Nyff: doc film The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the pair of narratives, Aurora and Tuesday, After Christmas. It was great to meet and talk with all of these filmmakers because they are truly at the forefront of one of the most exciting movements in international cinema, still relevant and vibrant since Cristi Puiu's Stuff and Dough and Cristian Mungiu's Occident landed in the Cannes' Director's Fortnight editions of 2001 and 2002. Late last week, I had the even greater pleasure of interviewing the team behind the Un Certain Regard selected Tuesday,...

by Vadim Rizov

Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas is the director's fourth feature, the first to see theatrical release (scheduled for the indefinite future) and the fifth sample of the Romanian New Wave that'll have a chance to be seen by more Americans than just 300 New Yorkers. (This list includes The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective.) Fairly or not, they form a coherent portrait of Romanian society, despite their directors' varying formal agendas. In them, Romania is a land of fluorescent lighting and charmless Soviet‐bloc architecture, populated by the drunk and dispossessed, the obese and weary, built on top of a collapsing infrastructure combining bureaucratic officiousness with minimal health care, where everyone is rude to everyone else for no good reason at all.

As it happens, there's a late‐breaking shout‐out to 12:08 East of Bucharest in Tuesday,...

Minutes and movement don’t matter in Radu Muntean’s opening scene for the Romanian drama Marti, dupa craciun/Tuesday, After Christmas which played at the New York Film Festival tonight. The camera is still and the take is far longer than what seems possible in an age of fast paced cuts and rapid action. And yet this scene is more thrilling than that of any action packed drama. Maria Popistasu and Mimi Branescu, two lovers, playfully tease each other as the camera, steadfastly glued to their naked bodies, records how they laugh and love in a carefree manner, and...

Not unlike Camerman, the documentary about accomplished cinematographer Jack Cardiff, Martin Scorsese’s A Letter To Elia, an hour-long half docu-ography/half diary entry regarding the life and movies of Elia Kazan, is a movie for strictly film festivals and the DVD collections of those that regularly attend film festivals.

The doc, written and directed by Scorsese and Kent Jones (writer for The Daily Show), doesn’t tell us anything new about Kazan’s highly-debated Black List days or how he felt about them (he’s recorded calling it the choice between two impossible choices) or even the trajectory of his film career. Instead, it offers a passionate look at the man’s canon from an equally immortal filmmaker and admirer.

Scorsese talks for the majority of the doc, and when the camera’s on him he speaks directly into the audience. The filmmaker speaks over dozens of clips from Kazan’s movies,...

Above: Mimi Branescu (left) in Tuesday, After Christmas.

Eyes crammed with images, ears filled to the brim with sound, and the brain jet-lagged, over-tired, over-joyed, and over-wearied—instant festival criticism is a talent of the rare stalwart few. This year I'm thinking of a different approach, leaving to the inexhaustible and comprehensive David Hudson the brilliant but unenviable task of up to the minute roundups of all from that Croisette that's fit to print (on your screen). Centering our on the ground coverage of the festival will take the form primarily of my favorite moment missives—the festival being such a sloppy, overwhelming explosion of cinema that anything but short impressions of memory seems imprecise and over-eager. So stay tuned til after the fest for a more indepth rundown. But for now, cine-critique fired from the hip!

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On Tour (Mathieu Amalric, France): Behind the Looking Glass

The first film I caught at the festival,...