Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World

In what many critics are calling one of the films of the year, Radu Jude takes two days in the life of an overworked Romanian production assistant, Angela (the incredible Ilinca Manolache), and gives us an urgent, pissed off, sourly funny polemic on the state of late capitalism that anyone can relate to. Tasked with filming half a dozen audition tapes with accident victims for a corporate work safety video, Angela also makes time to post scabrous TikTok videos as her cult alter-ego, Bobita, using a filter to transform herself into a misogynist Andrew Tate clone. On top of which Jude also throws in parallel clips from a (genuine) 1981 Romanian movie, Angela Moves On, about a Bucharest taxi driver played by Dorina Lazar.

The Godard of our times, Jude is an essential filmmaker for anyone serious about political cinema. Exploitation, discrimination and hypocrisy are his targets; dialectics are his dynamite. Adventurous, audacious, infuriating and inspiring, the film won the Special Jury Prize at Locarno to set beside the Golden Bear he won at Berlin for Bad Luck Banging, or Looney Porn.

A collage perched between road movie and black comedy, Jude’s latest is another effervescent study of life in the 21st century, a work that’s engineered to both sponge something of our screens-infested zeitgeist and interrogate its textures. Few filmmakers are so reliably able to conjure snapshots of modern capitalism and its neuroses; fewer still can douse those documents with so much playfulness and wonder as Jude.

Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage

Crass and sublime, trashy and sophisticated, headbanging and highbrow… This is a raucously entertaining and provocative piece, its sociopolitical antennas acutely tuned to our present moment and twitching with comic fury.

Jonathan Romney, Financial Times

The film further confirms Radu Jude as one of the most idiosyncratic, uncompromising, and intellectually vigorous of living filmmakers.

Seth Katz, Slant Magazine

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