As such, the title - at once jolly and sharply condemning - is a perfect reflection of the tone of the film, which uses its sharp wit and laughs like a knife.

| Jan 7, 2021

Eccentric, absurd, and ultimately a brutal portrait of late-Feudal Europe, Aferim! is a deservingly lauded calling card for Radu Jude in his increasingly formidable filmography.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 30, 2020

Yet another film about how superior we are to those awful racists from the 19th-century.

| Jun 28, 2016

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.

| Jun 27, 2016

The tone is Rabelaisian and earthily comic in the minimalist, picturesque squalor of the settings.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 7, 2016

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.

| Original Score: B+ | May 31, 2016

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.

| May 26, 2016

Jude keeps his camera at judicious distance, but its grit sets it apart from the stern minimalism of most contemporary Romanian filmmaking.

| May 25, 2016

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.

| Original Score: B | Mar 28, 2016

Shot in stark black and white, the picture's sense of place and time is strong - pungently so.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2016

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.

| Original Score: Highly Recommended | Mar 21, 2016

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.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 25, 2016

A twisted history lesson whose messages transcend its insular time period of 19th-century Romania.

| Original Score: B | Feb 19, 2016

Shot in black and white with fade-out transitions, the movie harks back to classic westerns. But it's also distinctly modern.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 11, 2016

Aferim! is a landscape film of gorgeous variety, which sends Costandin and Ionita riding through mountains, fields, and forests, and a folkloric romp of increasingly grisly tone.

| Feb 10, 2016

So intricately textured, well observed and meticulously researched are the incidents these two encounter... that the film seems to combine the best pleasures of historical romp, road movie and western.

| Jan 28, 2016

Everybody in Aferim! seems to hate and demean everyone else. And yet, they all seem like parts of the same blend of cultures - not a melting pot, but sort of a stew - that reasserts itself throughout the film.

| Jan 24, 2016

The antithesis of warm and reassuring, hard to snuggle up to, but impossible to take our eyes off of.

Full Review | Jan 22, 2016

Both a stark, widescreen black-and-white Western and a deadpan Romanian dramedy in the manner of 'The Death of Mr. Lazarescu' and the recently released 'The Treasure.'

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 22, 2016

Aferim! never tries to foreground its own significance and is ultimately much more affecting.

| Jan 22, 2016