Critics reviews

"Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn" is another dismal state-of-the-nation report card [from Radu Jude], but a more riotously bonkers one, as he throws decorum in the trash to reveal the hypocrisy of the powerful as the true vulgarity... Jude has made it impossible to look away.

The filmmaker’s bold approach suggests what might happen if someone spliced a late-period Jean-Luc Godard essay film into the middle of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” with such mesmerizing results that you just have to roll with it. One of European cinema’s most unclassifiable auteurs has delivered the bitter pill we deserve.

It’s perhaps the most direct sampler of pandemic-era filmmaking we’ve yet seen, with virus restrictions shaping both the form and the content of a scrupulously untidy satire about a schoolteacher whose sex tape is uploaded to the internet... It’s almost like an exorcism of all of the ideas that can ferment in a mind left alone too long with its thoughts.

It is an incendiary, playful, and wonderfully exasperated piece of filmmaking that shows a director trying to draw some threads of sense from our current malaise.

There is a bleak humour here, but also a kind of redundancy: the film constitutes a huge comedy pratfall that isn’t perhaps every bit as funny and meaningful as it was supposed to be... The film is a contemptuous slap at boredom, at hypocrisy and at everything petty and mean. I’m not sure that it entirely transcends all these things, but there’s a rebellious spark.

At times feverish delirium, at others sober critique – often both – "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn" is an unafraid display of confident filmmaking. In his choice of wielding the global pandemic as a catalyst instead of a protagonist, Jude fashioned an unforgettable modern fable that is as fresh as it is witty and, most of all, just batshit fun.

"Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn" is great luck for audiences looking for a surprising, subversive, imaginative take on language, sex, and the endless meanings of both. As its escalating three-part ending mirrors its three-part structure, its bold, brash approach proves unforgettable.

Jude’s willingness to experiment with form is exciting throughout, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the film’s all-over-the-place structure is ultimately a product of his failure to fully work through his ideas, as if the sheer quantity of different things happening here would excuse the fact that they don’t fit together in any coherent way.

The director may have overestimated our tolerance for such material. No matter how sophisticated the audience, it’s shocking to be confronted with graphic sex acts in a film’s opening minutes, before we’ve even met the characters.

A scattershot attack on sexual hysteria and political hypocrisy in an era of online slut-shaming. The humor is broad, the satirical targets many, the overall effect mixed... Formally daring as cinema, but disjointed and schematic as drama, [the film] will divide viewers and critics with its tonally jarring mix of fact and fiction, explicit imagery, salty language, bawdy comedy and social commentary.

This polemical investigation of pornography and social hypocrisy is a fiction-cum-essay in an altogether conceptual mode – by turns teasingly indirect and rather leadenly on the nose... Whatever the film’s flaws, this is certainly the most unrepentantly confrontational work we’ve yet seen from Jude - and perhaps from any Romanian director.

"Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn," a three-part dissection of modern-puritan values, delivers a sharp tonic through abundant visual flourishes and heavy, excessive didacticism... Jude has crafted an ornate imagistic and verbal feast,