Sieranevada

Cristi Puiu started the Romanian New Wave with The Death of Mr Lazarescu in 2005 and has spent the two decades since refusing to repeat it. Sieranevada — the misspelling is deliberate and never explained — went into the Cannes competition in 2016 and runs just under three hours, almost all of it inside one apartment.

Lary, a neurologist played by Mimi Brănescu, arrives with his wife for the ceremonial meal marking forty days since his father's death. The priest has not come. Until he does, nobody may eat, and the family has to occupy itself: an argument about the September 11th attacks, a sister-in-law who has joined a fringe political movement, a cousin who has brought a drunk friend, a widow's rage about her husband's mistress, a suit that will not fit the dead man's son. Puiu shoots it with a camera that pans between doorways in the hall, catching conversations halfway and abandoning them, so that the geography of the flat becomes the structure of the film.

It is very funny and increasingly claustrophobic, and its real subject is the volume of unfinished argument — about communism, about the revolution, about who behaved how — that a post-Ceaușescu Romanian family carries into a single hallway. Critics ranked it among the decade's best; it lost the Palme but confirmed Puiu as the most formally rigorous director working in the region.