Critic Reviews

Low-budget triumph.

The brilliance of Stuff and Dough is that it wraps this powerful, disturbing drama in an anecdote from ordinary life. As is often the case in recent Romanian movies, the acting is so accomplished as to be invisible.

It's a terrific little movie, gritty, real, ironic, ruthless and deeply humane.

Dryly funny, deceptively simple road movie that quietly reveals the state of contemporary Romanian life.

Puiu seems content to embrace the dynamism of youth and possibility; if "Lazarescu" was a movie of dead ends, Stuff and Dough is one, quite literally, of open roads.

There's no question of the mood Puiu means to capture, the sullen anomie of a rootless generation, but too often, he's just spinning his wheels.