What [the film] does best is take all that frustration and put it into one man's story. As he suffers, we feel his pain and irritation by proxy. That kind of humanity is often missing from debates about policy - but there's nothing more important.

Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional.

Puiu's seemingly artless, documentary-style mise en scène, with the characters followed by a shoulder-mounted camera, conceals countless subtleties, foreshadowings and running themes.

[The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu] isn't just a square slap in the face of state inefficiency. The film is about many things else, too: mortality, sympathy, the fragility and absurdity of life, which are sometimes indistinguishable.