Watcher opens with the image of its protagonist seen through a taxi’s window, the nocturnal lights of Bucharest reflected in the glass and superimposed over her face as the vehicle moves. Julia (Maika Monroe) has just arrived in the city with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman), an American-born Romanian who has returned to his motherland…
Text of Sex and the City: Radu Jude’s banging Bucharest symphony – my introduction to Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), screened 9th December 2021 at the Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford – in which I consider the tripartite film “as a recalcitrant member of the Romanian New Wave, as a sex comedy, as a…
The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu) first published by musicOMH In Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s 14th century masterwork The Divine Comedy, Dante is given a guided tour of the Underworld by fellow-poet Virgil, the better to help him on his eventual ascent to Heaven. So it is hardly a coincidence that Cristi…