If a film such as “The Irishman” or “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is unnecessarily long, then what will people say about “Malmkrog,” Cristi Puiu’s three-and-a-half-hour period adaptation?
Focused almost entirely on the intellectual discussions of five aristocrats gathered at a wintry Transylvanian mansion in the early 1900s, “Malmkrog” belongs to the milieu of cerebral art-films whose arduousness is perhaps exactly the point.
Cinephiles with a taste for the hardcore, painful pleasures of slow cinema, are encouraged to read further, but it’s difficult to recommend this feature to the movie-goer unacquainted with or baffled by the sorts of films in which “nothing happens.” Imagine “My Dinner With Andre” without the intimacy and zany.
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