On what the films of the Romanian New Wave accomplished collectively.

The Romanian New Wave — Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Radu Jude — emerged in the mid-2000s and produced a body of work that is among the most formally rigorous of any national cinema movement since the French New Wave.

The movement's shared characteristics: long takes, minimal music, a preference for ambiguity over resolution, and a specific relationship to Romanian history — particularly the legacy of communist rule — that generates irony without reducing it to satire.

Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) is the movement's origin point: a film about a sick man being passed from hospital to hospital that uses the form of a medical procedural to examine bureaucratic indifference with extraordinary patience.

Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the movement's masterpiece: a film about obtaining an illegal abortion in communist Romania that holds all of its emotional content in reserve until the final sequence.

Portumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest poses a historical question — whether anyone actually participated in the revolution on the day it happened — with a comic formalism that makes the question's implications expand the longer you sit with them.