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Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is at this month’s Locarno Film Festival for a screening of his take on Dracula (you can see a clip on Deadline), which was shot and set in Transylvania, where the vampire myth began, and sees Jude “embark on an epic odyssey to make Dracula great again.” 1-2 Special has acquired all North American distribution rights to the film and has described it as “a trademark Jude black comedy paying tribute to one of cinema’s greatest legends and featuring vampires, zombies, blood, sex, AI images and car chases.” While Jude gets his Dracula out into the world, it has now been revealed that he’s working on a Frankenstein movie – and he has brought in Romania-born Sebastian Stan, who is best known for playing Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to star in the film!

Jude will be writing and directing the Frankenstein film,...

Dracula is back on the big screen with a vengeance, courtesy of none other than Romanian provocateur Radu Jadu (Kontinental ’25, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World). Befitting the iconoclastic filmmaker’s reputation, of course, he is taking you on a bloody wild and absurd, dare we say — insane — cinematic ride to explore the legendary cinema myth in Dracula, world premiering in the competition program of the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland on Aug. 10. In the process, he aims to not only dissect Dracula, but cinema itself.

In fact, with the movie made on Dracula’s home turf, namely Transylvania, Jude really sinks his teeth into the most famous vampire and different dimensions of his image, as well as AI. After all, the film shows a young filmmaker working with an AI system to craft various filmic takes on Dracula.

Exclusive: Radu Jude is a Locarno Film Festival regular, and he returns to the Swiss event this year with his latest Dracula, for which we can share a first look clip above.

Shot and set in Transylvania, where the vampire myth began, the film sees Jude embark on an epic odyssey to make Dracula great again.

The Locarno premiere will mark Jude’s second major festival outing this year, after Kontinental ‘25, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at this year’s Berlinale.

1-2 Special has acquired all North American rights to the film and has described it as a trademark Jude black comedy paying tribute to one of cinema’s greatest legends and featuring “vampires, zombies, blood, sex, AI images and car chases”.

Teasing the project as last year’s Locarno Film Festival, Jude said: “I am from Romania. My father is actually from Transylvania. It’s time...

A bailiff has an identity crisis after a tragedy in Radu Jude’s new film, a scornful polemic on 21st-century Europe set between hope and despair

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. Like his previous film Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (whose lead actor Ilinca Manolache appears briefly in cameo here), Jude takes aim at bad faith and bad taste and takes us on what is almost a kind of architectural tour of Romanian malaise – this time in Cluj – in which he shows us the racism, nationalism, and a pointless obsession in the country’s governing classes with real estate and property development...

After a major 2024 with the wider release of his blistering satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (which nabbed a spot in our top 10) and the premiere of a pair of smaller-scale, experimental films, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is gearing up for another big year. His forthcoming Dracula film earned much anticipation on our 2025 preview and now he has revealed he’s finished another surprise feature as well.

His new feature Continental ’25 was “filmed independently, low-budget, in Cluj and Florești,” Jude tells Films in Frame. Described as “a moral dilemma post festum,” the filmmaker adds it’s “a modest attempt at dialogue with some themes from Rossellini’s Europa ’51.” The cast features Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța, Oana Mardare, Annamária Biluska, Marius Damian, and Ilinca Manolache. See the first look below.

When it comes to his vampire feature, it was originally going by Dracula Park,...

Nickel Boys was named best picture in the 59th National Society Of Film Critics vote on Saturday, while Payal Kapadia earned the best director award for her Indian drama All We Imagine As Light.

In the acting categories Marianne Jean-Baptiste from Hard Truths and Colman Domingo from Sing Sing took lead acting honours, with Michele Austin from Hard Truths and Kieran Culkin from A Real Pain earning supporting actor recognition. A Real Pain struck a second time as Jesse Eisenberg took the screenplay prize.

Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light was named Best Film Not In The English Language...

The National Society of Film Critics anointed Nickel Boys as the best film of the year on Saturday, adding some needed luster to a movie that is considered to be on the Oscar bubble.

Based on Colson Whitehead‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Nickel Boys tells the story of two teenage boys who struggle to survive at a violent, oppressive reform school in Florida. It has been feted by critics all season, scoring 90 on Metacritic and 87 percent freshness on Rotten Tomatoes. It was also named one of the top 10 movies of the year by the American Film Institute and earned Best Picture noms from the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes, but this is the highest-profile Best Picture win for the film so far from a critics group. However, according to Gold Derby’s latest odds, it is currently predicted not to make the Best Picture field when Oscar nominations are announced in two weeks.

Because the Golden Globes shouldn’t have all the fun the first weekend of the new year, the National Society of Film Critics presented its annual film awards this Saturday, with critics gathering in New York and Los Angeles to vote on 2024’s best movies and performances.

This year’s 59th annual award for Best Picture was presented to RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys,” with Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine As Light” serving as runners-up. Kapadia also managed to score Best Director, with Ross and Baker serving as runners-up in that category, as well as Best Foreign-Language Film.

Another highlight from this year’s crop of awards recipients is Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s win for Best Actress, making her one of five actresses to earn the critics association trifecta, the others being Imelda Staunton (“Vera Drake”), Sally Hawkins (“Happy-Go-Lucky”), Cate Blanchett (“Tar” and “Blue Jasmine”), and...

Voting for the National Society of Film Critics is now complete and films like “Nickel Boys” and “A Real Pain” took home top honors.

Nsfc was founded in 1966 and is comprised of over 60 critics hailing from outlets nationally. These journalists mark their annual voting selections for categories such as best picture, director, actor, actress, supporting actor and actress, screenplay and cinematography.

Voting is processed through a weighted ballot system which has critics vote for their top 3 picks. The nominee that garners the most points and is listed on the most ballots wins. The voting process only proceeds to a second round if necessary and voting continues for as long as required until a nominee receives the majority of votes.

“Nickel Boys” took home the Best Picture prize with “Anora” and “All We Imagine Is Light” as runner-ups. For A24’s “Sing Sing,” Colman Domingo earned the Best Actor award alongside...

One year shy of its diamond anniversary, the National Society of Film Critics has announced its winners.

On Saturday, the Nsfc held its 59th voting meeting in which they awarded Nickel Boys the Best Film of 2024, with acting honors for Colman Domingo, Kieran Culkin, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin, as well Best Director for All We Imagine as Light‘s Payal Kapadia and Best Screenplay for A Real Pain‘s Jesse Eisenberg.

The organization also bestowed awards to Sing Sing, Hard Truths and No Other Land. Anora, Conclave, The Brutalist, His Three Daughters, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown and A Different Man were among the runners-up.

Founded in 1966, the Nsfc consists of more than 60 members from major publications, using a weighted ballot system to determine its annual winners.

See the National Society of Film Critics’ full list of winners below.

Best Picture

Nickel Boys

Runners-up: Anora, All We Imagine as Light

Best Director

Payal Kapadia,...

“Nickel Boys,” the Colson Whitehead adaptation from director RaMell Ross, won best film from the prestigious National Society of Film Critics on Saturday. Jomo Fray’s cinematography was also honored by the organization.

The drama of two young men incarcerated at an inhumane school for boys in Florida, filmed almost entirely in first person, comfortably won the top award over runners-up “Anora” and “All We Imagine as Light.”

“All We Imagine as Light” picked up the best director prize for Payal Kapadia, who emerged victorious over RaMell Ross and “Anora” filmmaker Sean Baker, and also won the prize for best film not in the English language.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste took the best actress prize with a commanding ballot lead over her competition. The Brit won for her role as an irascible Londoner in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” completing her trifecta of critics awards (after victories from New York and Los...

The National Society of Film Critics has named Nickel Boys its best picture of 2024.

The film also received runner-up recognition for Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as the best supporting actress, RaMell Ross as best director and received the award for best cinematography.

Colman Domingo took home the prize for best actor for his role in Sing Sing, while Hard Truths star Marianne Jean-Baptiste won best actress. Fellow Hard Truths star Michele Austin was recognized in the best supporting actress category, and Kieran Culkin received the award for best supporting actor for A Real Pain. The film, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, also won best screenplay.

The best director prize went to Payal Kapadia for All We Imagine As Light, which was also recognized as the best film not in English.

The Nsfc was founded in 1966 and is made up of more than 60 critics from outlets across the country. They vote on their selections for best picture,...

For those of you tired of the usual holiday movie diet of sleigh bells, snowflakes, and sugarplum fairies, The Hollywood Reporter‘s international team has whipped up a menu of new foreign films, currently available to screen in the U.S., that offer something for a more refined cinema palate.

Whether your taste runs to Irish hip-hop or Mexican musicals, Austrian horror or Danish romance, family-friend Thai comedy, or adult-only Aussie animation, we’ve got you covered for those long winter nights.

Banel & Adama (Stream/Rent On: Apple, Amazon, Fandango) ‘Banel & Adama’

French-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s bold debut illuminates the complexities of love and identity in a Romeo and Juliet-style story set in rural Senegal. Featuring captivating performances by Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo as the titular couple, Banel & Adama combines rich, humanistic storytelling with stunning visuals to conjure a deeply imagined world. While the director...

The independent movie service has become the streaming home to some of the best cinema in the world.

After just over a month in theaters, Coralie Fargeat’s acclaimed and outrageous body horror film “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, will make its exclusive streaming debut this Halloween on the global film streamer Mubi, and to prepare from the switch, it’s time to countdown some of the platform’s best films!

Whether you’re activating or stabilizing your Mubi subscription to watch the must-see new release, the arthouse movie streamer is not only housed with classics like “In the Mood for Love,” “All About My Mother,” and more, it’s also packed with its own collection of Mubi-exclusive releases. From black comedies to neo-noir love stories, here are some of the best movies available to stream right now exclusively on Mubi!

7-Day Trial via amazon.com Mubi...

“The Romanian Film Centre is run by an idiot,” filmmaker Radu Jude, one of the eastern European country’s most successful recent international exports concluded at the tail end of a masterclass session he chaired at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

Jude name-checked Anca Mitran, head of the Romanian Film Centre, during the session as he answered a question about what he described as the current difficulties of landing financing from institutions for experimental or unconventional projects.

“They [Romanian Film Centre] will compare finished films with the screenplay a filmmaker submitted, and if there are any changes they will ask for their money back,” Jude told the enthusiastic audience, which included veteran producer Ted Hope. Hope is part of Locarno’s industry advisory board.

Jude returns to Locarno this year after snagging the Special Jury Prize in 2023 with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. He will debut...

Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World certainly makes an impression. While the title suggests that the film's vision of the future is bleak, it's unclear if Jude can imagine anything worse than it depicts in our present. The film is set in Bucharest, Romania, a city it show as an endless snarling traffic jam, in the process of having its entrails devoured by a system of global capitalism managed by vapid sociopaths. And yet, in its heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), it gives us a human perfectly evolved for her time. A millennial production assistant gigging on an industrial workplace safety video, the film follows her on a grueling workday of caffeine-fueled driving. Angela has a keen, ironic, perception of her world's moral rot, and yet she's able to instantly set that awareness aside whenever her work demands it, without a hint of internal contradiction.

With the global rise of fascism, increasingly frequent and brutal climate crises, and an upcoming U.S. election that no one short of the Cenobites from Hellraiser is looking forward to, it’s no surprise that cinema in 2024 has been grappling with some heavy and heady existential themes. Fear and anxiety thus play a central role in numerous films on our list, both in relation to concrete concepts like sexual assault and corporate malfeasance or more nebulous ones embodied by sound or even left invisible altogether, though still strongly felt.

Even if the general feeling of impending doom is increasingly in the air, certainly not every filmmaker felt the need to surrender to nihilism or despair. Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is, yes, a dystopic vision of modern society, but the aims of this raucous, wily satire are scarcely didactic. And...

“The Fall Guy” is swinging into theaters this weekend, as are the indie masterpieces “I Saw the TV Glow” and “Evil Does Not Exist.” Fortunately, a handful of fun and intriguing titles are also hitting digital platforms, including a dynamic documentary about a rock ‘n’ roll linchpin.

The contender to watch this week: “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg”

No, this isn’t a “Hunger Games” sequel. Anita Pallenberg was an actress, a New York It Girl, and a denizen of Andy Warhol’s Factory, but she is best known as an associate of the Rolling Stones. She dated founder Brian Jones and, later, guitarist Keith Richards, with whom she had three children. Some people have called her the band’s muse. Pallenberg’s life was not always as glamorous as it sounds, though, and directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill mine her highs and lows for a compelling...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSOrlando.The Cinema for Gaza Auction has raised over $100,000 so far for Medical Aid for Palestinians (Map). The auction, which features such donations as a bedtime story read by Tilda Swinton and Mubi’s entire catalog of Blu-rays, closes April 12. As SAG-AFTRA lobbies for legal limits on digital replicas of actors, IATSE negotiates for “some of the spoils of artificial intelligence” as part of their next contract. Across the US, historic cinemas are being restored (and sometimes repurposed) by celebrities, foundations, and unlikely corporations.CANNESFrancis Ford Coppola’s self-funded, much-ballyhooed Megalopolis (2024) will premiere in competition at Cannes, while the first part of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (2024) will premiere out of competition.Andrea Arnold will...

The end will not come with a bang, they say, but with a TikTok post featuring a fake incel bragging about his prolific sex life. We’re paraphrasing slightly, but somehow, we don’t think the folks behind Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World will mind — this is a movie that gleefully blends highbrow references and dick jokes while bending reality to its breaking point. The latest satire from Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, this provocation takes aim at a host of subjects: social media, the mainstream media,...

Q&a’s are a staple of indie opening weekends since they tend to sell tickets but Bob and Jeanne Berney’s Picturehouse has raised that bar, offering audiences seven-minute live burlesque revues before selected screenings of documentary Carol Doda Topless At The Condor. The ode to the woman, and to 1960s San Francisco where she broke out topless, opens in limited release in New York, LA, San Francisco and San Rafael. Dancers in what Bob Berney called a “Doda-esqe burlesque” will not be topless,” he said — “but pretty close.”

Dancers start in the audience then move to the front of the theater against a specially designed backdrop of image and sound on screen. “It brings you into that world immediately. You are there before the film starts,” he said.

“Eventizing” a film is great if you can do it. The box office is much better but still a bit weird since Covid.

I was more curious to see Radu Jude’s Zoom setup than that of any artist I’ve virtually interviewed given how prominently virtual backgrounds feature in the Romanian filmmaker’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. He explained his plain setup at the start of our call as the result of a Zoom update, which wiped his library of over a thousand images that he used to program as a live montage behind him. Jude did indulge me in a few glimpses of what he still had on hand, spanning from a photograph of soldiers standing atop a train car to a meme that positioned a Pepsi billboard next to the crucifixion of Jesus.

Seeing Jude’s collision of the historical and the contemporary, along with the somber and the silly, isn’t a privilege reserved for those fortunate enough to be in direct dialogue with him.

Radu Jude’s aptly and immensely titled new film, “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” only vaguely touches on the existential threat — or promise? — of artificial intelligence. But for any filmmaker, AI is a no-longer-looming reality one must tangle with. In fact, it’s an agent of chaos for the creative community even though machine learning has long been used to enhance productions.

So while artificial intelligence has been with us for a long time, it’s now taken on a scarier late-capitalist dimension, with ChatGPT and other AI-driven means to industry cost-cutting feeding fears about consent (with protections against AI a major point for SAG-AFTRA in its recent strike negotiations out of the strikes) and compressed job opportunity for actual human beings.

Suddenly, a self-navigating car seems more viable than an underpaid driver running late and exhausted. Suddenly, digitally capturing the likeness of an...

Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude has a pile of awards to his name — including a 2021 Berlinale Golden Bear for “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” — and isn’t too stressed about Academy Awards.

The provocation-making director, whose politically-bristly latest “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” arrives in select U.S. theaters next week, has repped Romania four times in the Best International Feature Oscar race — including for “Do Not Expect Too Much.” He’s never even been shortlisted, and as he told IndieWire in a recent Zoom conversation from his homeland, where he’s already at work on new films, he’s never even watched the Oscars.

“I don’t care about the type of cinema that is promoted by the Oscars. I mean, most of them,” he said. “Of course, I watch [the films]. I appreciate some of them. I like very much Martin Scorsese’s film,...

"Wild, hilarious, and cryptically profound." Buckle up! Mubi has revealed their full trailer for the acclaimed Romanian indie film titled Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, the latest creation by filmmaker Radu Jude (who won Berlinale's Golden Bear prize in 2021 for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn). This premiered at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival last year and many critics went berserk for it, heralding it as one of the best films at any festival last year. However, most people are not going to be into this one - it's nearly 3 hours long, mostly in B&w, following a woman driving around as she makes her own TikToks and cracks semi-offensive jokes all the time (here's my full review). An overworked and underpaid production assistant has to shoot a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company. But an interviewee makes a statement and must then re-invent...

Víctor Erice’s “Close Your Eyes,” Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” and Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” dominated this year’s 21st Ics Awards, winning the top prizes.

“Close Your Eyes,” which picked up best picture and best director, revolves around the mysterious disappearance of a Spanish actor during the filming of a movie. Although his body is never found, the police concludes that he has suffered an accident on the edge of a cliff. Many years later, the cold case resurfaces.

Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” won three awards, including best actress for Sandra Hüller, original screenplay for Triet and Arthur Harari, and editing for Laurent Sénéchal. The movie is nominated for five Oscars, seven BAFTA’s and 11 Cesar Awards.

The romantic fantasy “All of Us Strangers,” meanwhile, won four prizes, including best actor for Andrew Scott, supporting actor for Jamie Bell, adapted screenplay for Haigh,...

Have you ever felt so sad that it made you burst into uncontrollable laughter? That's precisely the emotional rollercoaster Radu Jude's latest picture, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, takes you on. The Romanian director skillfully captures the injustice, inhumanity and absurdity of modern-day capitalism through the life of Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked, sleep-deprived production assistant at a Romanian company serving Austrian clients. Angela is on a quest to find people injured at the firm’s worksites to feature in a safety video.

Jude opts for a dual narrative, intertwining Angela's present-day struggles with scenes from the 1981 picture Angela Moves On by Lucian Bratu. This method illustrates the parallel challenges faced by two overworked women named Angela, one in Ceaușescu-era Romania and the other in the contemporary period. Despite the absence of Ceaușescu, Jude’s film suggests that the fundamental issues, including sexism and social.

Chicago – The 59th Chicago International Film Festival (Ciff) announced its competitive award winners on October 20th 2023, and the recipient of The Gold Hugo in the International Feature Film Competition – the festival’s top honor – is ‘Explanation for Everything” (directed by Gábor Reisz), a coming-of age story.

Picking up the Festival’s Silver Hugo in the International Feature Film competition is “The Delinquents” (directed by Rodrigo Moreno). In the New Directors Competition, Amr Gamal’s “The Burdened” takes the Gold Hugo and Ena Sendijarevic’s “Sweet Dreams” takes the Silver Hugo. The complete list of honorees is below.

“This year’s winning selections truly reflect a global perspective, giving audiences a glimpse into lives and lived experiences they might not have had the opportunity to explore before,” said Chicago International Film Festival Artistic Director Mimi Plauché. “Hailing from every region on the planet from Hungary to Mexico, Argentina to Yemen, Sudan to the U.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is Radu Jude's deepest inquiry yet into our modern, image-saturated world. TikToks, a proto-feminist film from socialist Romania, a would-be Uwe Boll movie, and gritty black-and-white 16mm shots of a crowded city all coagulate into (another) grim satire about the the state of current-day Romania—and, inevitably, the state of the world, which, of course, seems to be ending. As we follow Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked film production assistant, the window of her car, much like a cinema screen, gives us a unique vantage point on a cacophonous Bucharest. Swearing in traffic, absurd arguments, work accidents: Jude throws us into a world of society-wide exhaustion, exacerbated by the tribulations of late capitalism. Yet who’s at fault? No one and everyone, all at once. Exploitation further...

For Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, writer-director Radu Jude may have captured more footage from the passenger seat of a car than Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry. Cinematographer Marius Panduru, shooting on high-contrast 16mm black-and-white film, renders the traffic-jammed streets of Bucharest as a nightmare vision of modern life. Our guide through this hellscape is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked and under-slept Uber driver and production assistant. She’s always on the verge of nodding off while driving, and watching cars stream by through the window is a quietly anxious experience.

Angela is conducting at-home auditions with several working-class employees of an Austrian furniture company who were injured on the job. One of the workers will then be selected to appear in a safety advisory video and share their story—or a company-approved version of it—as a cautionary tale slash ass-covering gambit.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.On the steep, cobbled street leading down from the GranRex cinema in Locarno, soon after emerging from El Rio y la Muerte, a deeply engrossing account of a bitter blood feud nourished by generations of Mexican machismo, I thought about Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. This was hardly an isolated incident. I had thought about Jude's movie while taking a bus to the other side of town the day before. I would be thinking about it again on a Zoom call the following week. Conversations with colleagues, a sandwich lunch on a bench, even some of my crisp-hotel-bed dreams were colored by the film, glancing off it, bumping into it, minding their own business only to be startled by it leaping out of a nearby shrubbery. When the guy in the...

Sovereign has acquired the U.K. and Ireland rights to Radu Jude’s latest feature, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” which won the special jury prize at Locarno Film Festival.

Written and directed by Jude, the comedy stars Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pîrșan, Dorina Lazăr, László Miske, Katia Pascariu and Sofia Nicolaescu, with cameos from Nina Hoss and Uwe Boll. According to its official synopsis, the film follows an overworked production assistant who is instructed to “film a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company. But an interviewee makes a statement which forces him to reinvent his story to suit the company’s narrative.”

“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” recently premiered at Locarno, where it was nominated for the Golden Leopard Award for best film and won the festival’s special jury prize. The film was well-received by critics at the fest,...

“Have you ever seen Romanian TikToks?” It’s a torrid afternoon in Locarno and Radu Jude and I are sitting in a container repurposed as an interview booth, a couple of days after the premiere of his latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Social media play a prominent role in the film, an electrifying snapshot of life in the 21st century designed to both immortalize our back-to-front digital zeitgeist and dissect its textures. A collage straddling black comedy and road movie, Do Not Expect centers on Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant whose company […]

The post “Rules Stop Me from Daring”: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Have you ever seen Romanian TikToks?” It’s a torrid afternoon in Locarno and Radu Jude and I are sitting in a container repurposed as an interview booth, a couple of days after the premiere of his latest, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Social media play a prominent role in the film, an electrifying snapshot of life in the 21st century designed to both immortalize our back-to-front digital zeitgeist and dissect its textures. A collage straddling black comedy and road movie, Do Not Expect centers on Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked production assistant whose company […]

The post “Rules Stop Me from Daring”: Radu Jude on Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Of the handful of directors who make up the Romanian New Wave, which kicked off two decades ago and is still going strong, Radu Jude is perhaps the most radical and exuberant — something like the movement’s Jacques Rivette or Jacques Rozier. He’s made everything from a coming-of-age comedy (The Happiest Girl in the World) to an historic western (Aferim!) to a bleak period drama (Scarred Hearts) to a contemporary sex satire (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, which won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2021).

His latest work, the nearly three-hour Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, may actually be his most experimental yet, with two parallel narratives — one set in in the present, the other consisting of found footage from the 1981 movie, Angela Moves On (Angela merge mai departe) — tackling similar stories of women eking out a living on the dog-eat-dog streets of Bucharest.

“Rossellini’s films,” Jacques Rivette wrote in a letter to Cahiers du Cinéma dated 1955, “have more and more obviously become amateur films––home movies.” The Frenchman saw the label as no indictment, but proof of their exhilarating vitality. In trading a cinema of ideas for projects that felt like “souvenir films” of Ingrid Bergman’s performances (1954’s Joan of Arc at the Stake; an episode in the 1953 anthology We the Women), the Italian director was finally able to move with “unremitting freedom,” and craft tales filled with the most quotidian details of his life: “everything [in them] is instructive, including the errors.” This idea of a gradual shift toward a more amateur and porous approach to filmmaking is also a great way to think about the cinema of Radu Jude. Long before the formal somersaulting of his 2021 Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the Romanian director’s films have hopscotched across genres and tones,...

Nobody can be both the magnifying glass and the ant burning up under its glare. Nobody, that is, except shaggy Romanian shaman Radu Jude who, with his Locarno competition entry “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” follows up 2021’s Berlinale-winning “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” with a dizzying, dazzling feat of social critique, an all-fronts-at-once attack on the zeitgeist, and a mischievous, often hilarious work of art about the artifice of work. Funny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when it’s work — as in, the pitiless daily grind — that will be the death of us all.

Life is short but art is long, the saying goes. And at two hours 43 minutes, “Do Not Expect…...

It’s rare that European cinema impacts on Hollywood but it’s exciting when there’s a trickle-down effect, like the connection to be made between Denmark’s stripped-down Dogme movies, which launched in Cannes in the late ’90s, and Steven Spielberg’s decision to go back to basics with Catch Me If You Can a few years later. It’s a moot point how many will ever see Romanian director Radu Jude’s follow-up to his 2021 Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, but, like Bob Dylan going electric or the Sex Pistols making their ramshackle debut at a London art school, this wilfully uncommercial but bloody-minded film could be genuinely seminal in its anarchic and totally individualistic approach, slipping discordant, Godardian subversion into a darkly comic, Ruben Östlund-style human drama.

The intro suggests a boring academic exercise, positing the first half (“A”) as...

Editor’s Note: This review originally premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival. Mubi will release it in theaters on March 22, 2024.

It takes flair to concoct visual-gag-after-visual-gag within episodic riffs on the raw deals suffered by the gig-economy-classes in modern day Bucharest. Radu Jude blends absurdist humor with keen social integrity, like a sharper Romanian riposte to Ruben Östlund, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange builds to a 40-minute final shot in which tragicomedy is heaped upon tragicomedy to unbearably brilliant effect.

Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope.

Ange also trusts her audience to correctly interpret a character she performs to a growing online following.

Berlin Golden Bear winner Radu Jude, whose latest feature, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” premieres Aug. 4 in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, is in post-production on his next film, Variety can reveal.

“Eight Postcards From Utopia” is a found-footage documentary assembled from advertisements made during the post-socialist period in Romania. Co-directed by Jude and the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz, and edited by long-time collaborator Catalin Cristutiu, the film turns the fictional and often ludicrous medium of advertising clips into a lens on the desires, beliefs, hopes and fears of a country making the turbulent transition to democratic capitalism.

The documentary, which will be completed by the end of the year, is a continuation of a “preoccupation of mine about how images are constructed in the world,” Jude told Variety. “The use of images, the way they are made, the way they are used.”

The...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival, Europe’s biggest mid-Summer movie event, has announced its lineup, welcoming recognizable names to its main competition, from Filipino auteur Lav Diaz (“Essential Truths of the Lake”) to Romanian powerhouse Radu Jude, who will show “Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World.”

As already announced, Cate Blanchett and Zar Amir Ebrahimi are set to attend the Locarno Film Festival’s closing night to promote the European launch of Iranian-Australian director Noora Niasari’s debut film “Shayda.”

Among the titles selected for Locarno’s more broad-audience-friendly Piazza Grande lineup, Justine Triet will attend with her Cannes Palme’ d’Or winner “Anatomy of a Fall,” along with Ken Loach and his “The Old Oak.”

The festival will also celebrate the careers of Harmony Korine, producer Marianne Slot, editor Pietro Scalia, Tsai Ming-liang and present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Italian producer Renzo Rossellini.

Radu Jude’s latest film won the Grand Prix - Crystal Globe, whilst Robert Pattinson and Barry Levinson also collected awards.

The 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 29 - July 7) closed today with its annual awards ceremony.

Radu Jude’s latest film “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” won the Grand Prix - Crystal Globe, whilst Robert Pattinson and Barry Levinson also collected awards.

Scroll down for full list of winners

“Barbarians” was selected by grand jury comprising Mark Cousins, Zrinka Cvitešić, Marta Donzelli, Zdeněk Holý and Nanouk Leopold. The Crystal Globe comes with $25,000 prize money.