Critic Reviews

The strength of Tuesday, After Christmas, Mr. Muntean's fourth feature, lies in its rigorous, artful and humane fidelity to quotidian circumstance.

More broadly this is a resonant, vivid and finally heartbreaking tale about the universal difficulty of marriage and the endless self-delusion of the human condition, driven by a trio of amazing dramatic performances.

More about well-observed moments of everyday life than it is about heightened melodrama.

The latest bloom from the flourishing garden that is Romanian cinema, Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas chronicles the emotional fallout from a classic love triangle, but it unfolds with the agonizing tension of a suspense film.

At first glance, Tuesday, After Christmas seems, in both form and content, only a modestly ambitious endeavor. Yet the singular attention with which it carries out its aims-and the rigorous success it ultimately attains-is nonetheless unsparing, and bracing.

Again, Muntean and his script collaborators offer exceptionally naturalistic dialogue.

Director Radu Muntean has pulled off the near-impossible, turning each scene (captured in capacious long takes) into arias of generosity for his actors.

They breathe originality into an oft-told story.

The dissected minutiae of this adultery drama unfortunately doesn't add up to a very original or moving whole.

Rather than take a broad-brush approach director Muntean boggs us down in the detail of an adulterous affair. There are some similarities with his previous outing "Boogie" in that the main character is a man having a premature mid-life crisis.