Stuff and Dough and more Romanians.

"[Cristi] Puiu's second feature, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, winner of the Prix un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2005, introduced many European and American critics to a new kind of tough, socially critical realist cinema blossoming in Romania," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Stuff and Dough, a 2002 film belatedly crossing the ocean in the wake of Lazarescu, is more modest in scope but no less impressive in its self-confidence, its candor and its stringent, undogmatic contemporary relevance."

Updated through 4/26.

"Where Lazarescu was old and long, Stuff and Dough is young and short," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "But both films are travelogues of a sort - one confined to the back of an ambulance, the other to a cargo van - in which you can sense Puiu, who moved to Switzerland shortly after the 1989 revolution and returned to Romania in the late 1990s, is sorting out his relationship to a country he doesn't fully recognize, while that country does the same."

"The film is all rhythm, with Puiu's camera jumping to and from anxious faces but sometimes landing on empty space," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Stuff and Dough suggests that time, like procedure, is of the essence in Romania, though it lacks Lazarescu's gravitas and poignancy."

"Like Jeff Nichols's excellent Shotgun Stories, a recent American film that told a revenge story without stooping to catharsis, Stuff and Dough recasts a road movie game of cat-and-mouse as a zero-affect shrug-a-thon," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "By the standards of Steven Spielberg's Duel, George Miller's Mad Max and other pumped-up, fleshed-out films of a similar circumstantial trajectory, Stuff and Dough is uneventful and anticlimactic to the extreme. That doesn't make the film's journey any less worthwhile, nor its ultimate lesson - that when traveling the economic frontiers of crime, there is no such thing as easy money or limited partnership - any less trenchant."

At Film Forum through May 6.

Meanwhile, Shining Through a Long, Dark Night: Romanian Cinema, Then and Now, the series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, carries on through Sunday and aquarello's posted half a dozen sharp and concise reviews so far.

Update: "[I]f this were an American film, it would most likely play out as a stoner-comedy variation on The Wages of Fear," writes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot of Stuff and Dough. "But what keeps it refreshing and even, in its own way, gripping is that it resists glib characterizations, just as it avoids the conventional genre satisfactions of high-speed car-chases and deals gone wrong. As in Lazarescu, Puiu's tone isn't quite blackly comic - it doesn't simply cut its characters adrift and watch from a condescending remove as they scramble towards their fate."

Update, 4/26: "Stuff and Dough sometimes briefly turns into a slow-speed chase movie - think Bullitt filmed with stick-shift vans on Romanian back roads," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "But for the most part, the movie is as adrift as its post-teen characters, slogging through the muck of post-Communist Europe with eyes cast firmly downward.... 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."

Posted by dwhudson at April 23, 2008 1:16 AM