Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker
What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Romania, France, Switzerland · 2011
3h 1m
Director Cristi Puiu
Starring Cristi Puiu, Clara Vodă, Catrinel Dumitrescu, Luminița Gheorghiu
Genre Drama
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For two days, Viorel wanders the streets of Bucharest, reeling after his recent divorce. He drives across the city, accompanied only by his dark and obscure thoughts, to take drastic action. A cold Romanian drama that Anca Puiu, the film’s producer, describes as “a crime story from a new perspective.”
Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker
What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?
A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu's Aurora continues the Romanian writer-director's obsession with time as his main narrative device.
Call it a mental workout that (although considerably less arduous than reading Sartre) some might find exhausting and others exhilarating. Aurora is not a movie to make you glad that you exist; it's a movie that makes you aware that you do.
New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier
Maddeningly mundane, this Romanian drama aims for an antiseptic look at random violence and, unfortunately, achieves it.
Puiu offers zero insight into his character; only suckers will find the pose artful or nourishing. Skip it.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.
Over a difficult three-hour sprawl, Cristi Puiu's Aurora fully explores the time before and after a killer strikes, and it has the cumulative effect of making what passes for a "motive" seem absurdly simplistic.
San Francisco Chronicle by Walter Addiego
The film takes its time detailing his mundane activities, often withholding the kind of information audiences usually expect, and it's Puiu's talent to transform it all into a highly disturbing portrait - both of an individual and a society.
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