Siddhant Adlakha

The movie delivers subtext aplenty, overflowing in ways that help overcome its reserved exterior and make for an unobtrusive comedy-drama that, on occasion, comes close to working.

It’s the rare movie whose every artistic intention can be easily identified, but whose emotional effects are never discovered.

Through its exploration of spaces rarely put to film, the movie urges a more thoughtful meditation on our fraught link to nature and to the world at large, collapsing past and present into a single point on screen.

The film is one of homespun naturalism, but Atlan also exhibits immense formal control.

Los Javis have created a towering war epic that twins internal and external conflicts on the precipice of global change, in ways that render the soul—making it more open to, and more capable of, bearing witness to its joys and sorrows, and understanding its own strength and fragility.

Building on the discomforting courtroom unfurling of RMN—[Mungiu's] previous film, about the mechanics of mounting anti-immigrant sentiment—Fjord traces the most delicate, most pliable dynamics of modern democracy, in a tale designed as much to infuriate as to engender difficult introspection.

At a mere 94 minutes in length, its meandering, meta-textual appearance might seem like a misfire at first, but it disguises what might be Jude’s most slyly character-focused work, culminating in a completely unexpected emotional gut punch.

On one hand, there’s perhaps no more honest depiction of a relationship between a parent and their adult child having hit a wall, and a point of no return. On the other hand, pushing against this inevitability is a much more intriguing concept than simply presenting it as-is, over and over again, even when its specifics are disguised by a fable.

The film plays out like a tale where too much has been relegated to the margins and left between the cuts, where the performances shine but their emotional foundations have been laid in reverse.

It’s a gorgeous-looking film, but one that doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon, given the linearity and literal nature of its approach to human anguish. At over two hours in length, its points are made with clarity before being repeated ad nauseam.