Critic Reviews

The tame and the wild roam through R.M.N., nipping at its edges, adding visual texture and deepening its themes.

There are no easy answers here, only people and centuries of redrawn borders.

It is a work of patient yet painful observation that exposes how a community of struggling people can easily turn hateful.

Mungiu is a master of the long, talky slow burn, and if R.M.N. often feels less focused and more sprawling than some of his earlier movies (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Graduation”), that’s a testament to its expansiveness and ambition. The story becomes increasingly gripping as it meanders and lingers, broadens and deepens, putting peripheral characters into play and bringing latent hostilities to the surface.

R.M.N. is one of the most searing cinematic examinations of xenophobia I’ve ever seen.

It’s a fascinating and utterly engrossing film, immersing us in this world, fretting over what we can see coming before the principals do, and relating it to the xenophobia and bigotry out in the open in America, just as it is in backward, rural Transylvania.

Mungiu doesn’t traffic in easy hero and villain narratives. He’s more interested in revealing how easily anyone can be both.

Pulling harder and harder at the tension between complex socioeconomic forces and the simple human emotions they inspire, R.M.N. masterfully spins an all too familiar migration narrative into an atavistic passion play about the antagonistic effects of globalization on the European Union.

Its dizzying culmination of ideas proves more feature than bug.

This is masterly understated filmmaking marked by a few stand-out sequences, particularly a one-shot town hall meeting that lasts for an entire reel and throws all the issues on the table before erupting into chaos.