The fascinating, tragic source material behind Beyond the Hills could have made for a great movie, but director Cristian Mungiu misses the mark.

I’m generally a proponent of the notion that if there is information essential to the understanding of your movie that isn’t contained in your movie, then there’s a good chance you’ve failed to do your job as a filmmaker. Andrei Ujică’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu would be one of the exceptions to that rule.

Twenty years after the death of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romanians are still sorting through the legacy of his iron-fisted regime. This is especially apparent in the fantastic new wave of Romanian cinema of the last decade, as the country’s filmmakers are consistently fascinated with their totalitarian past and its aftermath. Even in a film like Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, which is set in the present and contains no direct references to Ceauşescu, the man’s shadow…