Kontinental '25

In common with Jude’s scathing attack on the gig economy and toxic online culture in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 takes a scattershot approach to various targets: anti-Semitism, capitalism, nationalism and religious hypocrisy. The incomparable writer-director’s dark comedy doesn’t care to resolve its heroine’s quandary; it’s out to poke with ethical heft and barbed wit.

At once incisive and ambiguous, it’s proof that Jude is operating on a completely different level than most of his contemporaries.

Everything in the characteristically hyper-literate Kontinental ’25 is shaped by influence and allusion, which itself points back to Jude’s singular predilection for refracting film history through the prism of modern life. The movie itself is essentially just one big riff on Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” another hyper-topical story about a guilt-stricken woman’s search for peace.

This story of a guilt-ridden bailiff ostensibly resembles conventional social realism but then broadens its scope fascinatingly, foregrounding satirical intent and a mischievous degree of verbal overload.

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair.

Radu Jude’s cinema isn’t exactly absurdist, though it exposes the absurdities of a present reeling from the unresolved injustices of yore.

This lacks the zest and dynamism of Jude’s more subversive output, though even a minor work from a major filmmaker still manages to thrill and tantalize.