MOVIE REVIEW
Beyond the Hills (2013)
Sundance Selects
Cristian Mungiu’s third full-length film divided opinion when it premiered at Cannes in May, where it won some enthusiastic admirers it but failed to achieve the consensus of critical appreciation that coalesced around “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” a few years earlier.
It’s not hard to see why, because it doesn’t quite satisfy the distinct requirements for Cannes’s respective core crowds. Although it’s long and foreboding, it doesn’t quite display enough fanatical austerity or philosophical rigor to appeal to hard-core slow cinema adherents. But neither is it the relatively accessible and salable arthouse product that might appeal to buyers and distributors, unlike Mr. Mungiu’s previous film. Lying somewhere between these two dominant schools of art-cinema appreciation, the film may fall between the cracks when it comes to 2012 retrospective lists, but there’s still much to admire about Mr. Mungiu’s filmmaking.
