If the humor were any drier, it would be dust.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 22, 2016

Slowly ... something changes, and the functionality of Porumboui's style gives way to an ever-so-slight hint of wonder.

| Jan 10, 2016

"The Treasure" suggests that you can have both feet of clay and flights of fancy, and in the battle between the prosaic and the pie-eyed, the prosaic doesn't always have to win.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 9, 2016

It's good absurdist stuff, a little reminiscent of the work of Aki Kaurismki, albeit without that filmmaker's wooly-headed whimsy.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 8, 2016

Deadpan, determinedly low key and deeply absurd, the films of Corneliu Porumboiu are very much a particular taste, and "The Treasure" is no different.

| Jan 7, 2016

This charmer is determinedly mundane and low-key, until an unexpected finale transforms it.

| Jan 7, 2016

"The Treasure" is like the work of Samuel Beckett's long-lost Balkan cousin - bleak, stoic and suffused with a flinty, exasperated empathy for its ridiculous characters.

| Jan 7, 2016

Minimalism of the sort that Porumboiu specializes in is an extremely hard register to maintain, and in this film, it involves the viewer walking a tightrope as much as the director does.

| Jan 7, 2016

Though it almost overplays its hand with a Robin Hood storybook motif, The Treasure manages a tricky balance between low-key social satire and total fantasy.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 7, 2016

The film is an unusual mixture of joy and cynicism.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 6, 2016

In a manner so sly you could overlook it, Porumboiu invests this tissue-thin premise with the shadows of Romanian history ...

| Jan 5, 2016

The Treasure is both another testament to his eye for telling details and Porumboiu's most seamless combination yet of fiction and fact.

| Jan 4, 2016

This is a very worthy successor to the director's lauded 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective, and a more accessible work than his 2013 meta-movie When Evening Falls on Bucharest.

| Dec 9, 2015

Treasure still confirms Porumboiu's status as one of the more fascinating minds working in cinema today.

| Dec 9, 2015

Filming with long, ironically balanced takes, Porumboiu delivers an ingeniously intricate goofball comedy that evokes heroes of legend while bringing sociological abstractions to mucky life.

| Oct 8, 2015

The Treasure is no thriller, but there are moments here that inculcate the stakes with prisoner's-dilemma paranoia.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 8, 2015

You don't have to be a scholar of late 20th-century Romanian economics to get the satire. However, I suspect that those who do catch the signifiers will find even more riches in the soil.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 5, 2015