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

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 7, 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

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

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

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

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

Jude gets strong performances from his three leads and, with the help of cinematographer Marius Panduru, has created an uncommonly beautiful film ... that at times evokes the simple beauties of classic Westerns.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 22, 2016

In subject and style, it's a departure from [Jude's] contemporary satires, but the period story is evidence of the same keen eye for class hierarchy, codified cruelty and the limits of self-deception.

| Jan 21, 2016

Like many films set in contemporary Bucharest, this is a story of self-styled potentates, small-time graft, and inevitable disappointment.

| Jan 21, 2016

A funny and brutal costume drama with a potent contemporary kick.

| Jan 21, 2016

Shot in widescreen black-and-white on 35mm, the film combines the structure of a classic Western with the look of Eastern European films from the 1960s, to reasonably absorbing effect.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 21, 2016

The laughs come from our disorientation at witnessing a world that is insanely peculiar, so different from ours in its understanding of right and wrong that we sit in amazement.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2016

Lyrical and nightmarish in turns, but in no way nostalgic, Jude's reconstruction of this world makes for one of the most striking films of the last year, and a flamboyant anomaly in today's often cautious world of European art cinema.

| Jan 20, 2016

Its spotlight on racial prejudice has resonance given the current refugee crisis, as does its jaded attitude toward any political or economic change.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 20, 2016

Aferim! plays like a sleight of hand, amusing us at a distance with vulgarisms and entrancing us with countryside while the bloody work of civilization grinds on out of the corner of our eye.

| Jan 19, 2016

"Aferim!" may be set in the 19th century, but this Romanian drama couldn't be more contemporary in its themes. Bigotry and fear grip the characters in ways that will be uncomfortably familiar to modern eyes.

| Jan 18, 2016

The crisp black-and-white photography and brisk panning shots across alluring landscapes capture the cruelty of the times and the pitiless course of history with a bitter majesty.

| Jan 18, 2016

Despite subject matter that involves slavery, torture, and relentless bigotry, the film is wildly, bitterly funny.

| Jan 4, 2016