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Porumboiu returns at his best here with this pretty jewel. As one of the emblems of the new Romanian cinema, and after the acclaimed "Bucharest 12:08" (also known as "A fost sau n-a fost?"), he adds new dimensions to his well established style that had become his trademark.

Like Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films, this movie takes all the time it needs to portrait a real life scene, but in a way you don't lose the focus on a very rich story. Then, you can see the other hand of the "real time" cinema: not a frenetic race against time in order to deactivate some bomb, but the nerve-destroyer atmosphere of things when time seems to go very slow. Like in David Lynch's 'Straight story' when he makes you desperately bite your nails watching a 10 km/h (and not a 150 km/h) drive. Porumboiu succeeded making me feel the devastating tedious of a policeman waiting for something to happen while losing time to complete the (vital) other tasks needed.

here we also found he used the magic formula for a straight way to hilarious humor: like in the final scene with the TV broadcast in Bucharest 12:08, the movie goes on until it falls into a long scene in which it reaches climax: a dialectic battle which will solve the conflict in the movie, and will also let you thinking a couple of days about it. Is law the limit? where are the limits for the law? what's moral anyway?

Maybe Jim Carrey's fans won't get a major laugh with this film, but if you enjoy more refined styles like immortal Monty Python or even Moliere's books, maybe you'll touch paradise while listening the cheesy pop-song that the wife of the policeman plays three times in a row, while you'll say "Only Porumboiu!"

After watching Luna's "Yo puta" ("I, Whore") some years ago, "Diario de una ninfómana" first attracted me from its title and I thought I would find a similar movie in some way, i.e. intimate sex confessions told in first person by a woman, with some air of indie movie and an average cast with some highlighted appearance (Daryl Hanna in Yo Puta, Geraldine Chaplin in this movie). Never could be so wrong! Despite the entertaining and well done strange storytelling in Yo Puta combining fiction and documentary, "Diario de una ninfómana" is just a plain story with a weak script and less than horrible acting. At the first 2 minutes you perceive the movie will not be good. As usual when a famous actor takes part in a bad movie, the star does not bright (look at Al Pacino's 88 minutes!). Geraldine Chaplin looks very weak here.

But the outstanding moments in the film (a film based on nude scenes to make some noise on the scene and get some nympho-intrigued people to the theaters) certainly are those of the astonishingly pathetic acting from Leo Sbaraglia. The Argentinian does it so bad that I will keep a copy of the movie just to show my friends the worst acting ever seen in the film industry. His dramatic part of a crazy bipolar husband will make you laugh a lot!

This is my favorite Argentinian film from the color era. Pepe Soriano at his best, in a superb acting performance, plays this 'Beto Sanchez': a middle-class man at his forties in the seventies who loses his job, and as he finds out that the society/system has no place for him anymore, he starts a revenge against all kind of institutions which made him undergo all kinds of oppression. As Michael Douglas in "Falling down" (1993), he builds himself as a next-door-(anti?)hero, going against all those things he judges as responsible for his current situation, even killing or at less coerting them. You can keep with the simple story, and you'll have a poor madman who intends to kill the priest, the teacher and the former girlfriend... but if you scratch the surface, you'll find this Olivera's masterpiece: Beto Sanchez does not fight the priest or the teacher, he fights the oppression from the Church and the School -as institutions- over his childhood. With every revenge, Beto Sanchez questions the real necessity for every one of those institutions. He shows the decadence of a Society. He fights against Injustice at its very roots. He does not simply question the "official" institutions as the Army and the Enterprise, he also goes -e.g.- for the unfaithful friendship. Federico Luppi also shines on his brief but essential character. The direction is very good, as the acting and dynamics.