4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days

"The Golden Palm winner at last year's Cannes Film Festival, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a film about the ultimate test of friendship and black market abortions in communist era Romania. So yeah, it's not going to do anything to change the stereotype of Eastern European cinema as bleak and depressing. It is, however, a film so crammed full of emotion and highly wrought drama that a screening ends up a being a draining experience, but a rewarding one if you can immerse yourself in the world of the characters."

"Pitch perfect and brilliantly acted, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is a stunning achievement, helmed with a purity and honesty that captures not just the illegal abortion story at its core but the constant, unremarked negotiations necessary for survival in the final days of the Soviet bloc."

"It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement."

"An unsentimental, uncompromising and angry masterpiece with not a trace of preachiness."

"It's distressingly real, incredibly grim, and an experience that will stay with you for far longer than the title might suggest."

"Tense, kinetic, intelligent and real – as if Paul Greengrass had remade Vera Drake."

"Cleverly, Mungiu uses the whole frame, frequently placing characters on the edge and even outside it. But be warned, while most of this understated, subtle, tense talk-fest is implicit (nudity is tastefully and artfully shot), there is one disturbing image most certainly not for the faint hearted. Proof that subtlety and silence can produce powerful drama."

"This is a film about cruelty, but one which channels humanity. Brilliant."