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THE DEATH OF MR. LĂZĂRESCU

Cristi Puiu Romania, 2005
By training a camera on one man in his final hours of procedural, diagnostic, institutional treatment, Puiu challenges us to sit with the universal, unutterable agony of care for the dying.
December 9, 2009
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The Boston Phoenix
An odyssey of modern bureaucratic agony that’s Kafka-esque in its shape but painfully particular in its details.
October 1, 2007
This is a case where Fiscuteanu is called upon simply to be. And what a movingly hapless presence he has, writhing, yowling, sinking further into agony. The performance seems all the braver because the movie doesn't perfume it with any of the grand flourishes that great literature or cheesy moviemaking can provide.
July 28, 2006
Puiu’s hospital drama never localizes these mistakes, nor makes a monolith out of The System to blot out all nuance (though the “Lazarescu” pun suggests Romanian health care might take a miracle to fix). He suggests an effective dramatic model for approaching a social issue without the usual melodrama or ostentatious sense of the exemplary.
May 11, 2006
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is not merely the finest exemplar of Bazinian realism—it also virtually becomes documentary, so real and affecting are its moment-to-moment emotions. There can be no higher praise for fiction filmmaking. For my money, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is the finest film of this young century.
May 11, 2006
Initially conceived under the spell of hypochondria and James Cagney, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a cinematic experience of singular intensity and vision. A rueful record of its eponymous hero's final six hours on earth, it depicts the deterioration of Lazarescu Dante Remus as he is shuttled among Bucharest emergency rooms whose indifference to his condition would be darkly comedic if it didn't have such mortal implications.
May 1, 2006
If there’s a tougher sell than a Romanian movie by a hitherto unknown director, it’s a Romanian movie by an unknown director that takes two and half hours to tell the tale of a 62-year-old’s final trip to the hospital. Does it help to add that The Death of Mr. Lazarescu was the great discovery of the last Cannes Film Festival and, in several ways, the most remarkable new movie to open in New York this spring?
April 18, 2006