(Radu Jude, 2023, Romania/Luxembourg, 164 minutes)

Romanian director Radu Jude has been creeping into St. Louis movie theatres in recent years, as his 2015 effort Aferim! played at the Webster Film Series when it was new and 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, one of the greatest of all of the pandemic movies, screened at SLIFF that year. He’s back with his most acclaimed film yet, the anarchist satire Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which indeed is one of the best-reviewed movies of the year so far. Our main character is Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a production assistant on a workplace safety video who is made to run errands all over Bucharest and, in between menial work tasks, makes TikToks under the guise of a bro named Bobita. Along the way Angela encounters the (real) schlockmeister director Uwe Boll, here playing himself, as well as Nina Hoss (star of Christian Petzold films Barbara and Phoenix) as an executive at the company she’s making the workplace safety video for.

In Romanian with English subtitles.