‘Men of Deeds’ Review: A Rural Cop Sinks Into a Typically Romanian Moral Quagmire in a Grimly Dark Comedy

Having failed to cut it in the city, mild-mannered Romanian cop Ilie takes a lower-pressure job as a police chief in a rural village near the Moldovan border. Expecting a quieter, easier life of mostly benign duties, he instead encounters even more violence and moral rot than he did before. That he’s surprised suggests Ilie (played by Iulian Postelnicu with a permanent woebegone grimace) hasn’t spent much time watching his own country’s cinema. An exceedingly mordant comedy that gradually bleeds out to tragedy, Paul Negoescu’s “Men of Deeds” is another Romanian exercise in finding personal and institutional corruption under every… Read Full Article