The mood is as dismal as the weather in Import/Export, by Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 31, 2009

Ulrich Seidl's Import Export is an unflinching, at times almost unbearably hard yet moral look at human exploitation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 31, 2009

Import Export demands we contemplate the horror and the beauty of existence in equal measure.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 30, 2009

The titular backslash of Import/Export turns out to be a vast geographical schism, crossed only intermittently by thin strands of mutual emotional anguish.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 28, 2009

Seidl's film arguably offers the toughest (and toughest to stomach) portrait of individuals tempest-tossed by the currents of the new global economy.

| Jul 21, 2009

Seidl is a special talent, reared on documentary and determined to get near the truth with a placidly baleful eye. You are at liberty to hate or admire his work - but you can scarcely ignore it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 3, 2008

Bafflingly, this film leaves you not knowing whether to kill yourself, cry, walk out or laugh.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 3, 2008

At times it feels like a continuation of Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-ever in its catalogue of injustices and humiliations, yet, against the odds, it rewards your endurance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 3, 2008

The Austrian miserablist who gave us Dog Days - sharper and more mischievous in its portrait of exurbia's human excreta - delivers an essay in symmetrical despondence that seems both tidy and empty, like a trash can after street-cleaning.

| Oct 3, 2008

Import Export is a work of the utmost political importance. It is also, in its rigour and fearlessness, its sorrow and pitilessness, an outstanding artistic achievement.

| Oct 3, 2008

There is one thing that is beyond doubt: this extraordinary film makes everything else around look comfy and pedestrian.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 3, 2008

Seidl has a distinctive and disturbing vision, but he is not inclined to explore the humanity of his characters, just their status as victim or abuser.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 3, 2008

A sobering treatise on the bleakness of existence.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 3, 2008

Seidl's canny mix of professional and non-professional actors delivers a series of performances, major and minor, of genuinely heart-tugging truth and heartening humanity.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Oct 13, 2007

Miserable but masterful.

| May 23, 2007

A tawdry little film ostensibly about the cultural clashes resulting from the proximity of former Soviet states, such as the Ukraine, to western nations such as Austria. There is a film to be made on the topic, but this isn't it.

Full Review | May 22, 2007