But whatever I thought of the narrative of the film I agree with you wholeheartedly in one respect — Jia’s eye for photography is magnificent.

I think it’s a safe bet to assume that if you liked the novel, you’ll liked the film. I don’t the film is an unqualified success, for the reasons I elucidated in my review, but I would also add that time has made me come around to the notion that this may be the best “faithful” adaptation of McCarthy’s novel we could have hoped for: good but not great. There’s a better movie in the novel somewhere, but it would require quite a bit of rejiggering of the source material. The Coens took No Country For Old Men, a great novel, and turned it into a cinematic masterpiece precisely because they knew exactly where McCarthy’s sensibilities and their own overlapped, and where they complemented one another. Hillcoat isn’t doing anything so daring. His vision of the The Road is just a reverent filmic version of the novel’s substantive and emotional core. Good stuff, just not great.

I’m particularly interested in seeing Mortenson as the Man; he may very well be one of only a handful of actors who could pull off this role. It’s actually one of the reasons I’m so eager to see this film.

I hear it’s out on Blu-ray this spring; I’m waiting for it with both trepidation and excitement. Trepidation because it’s just so damn emotionally battering; excitement because this father and son love story is just so damn beautiful.

Here are the key passages:

“Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us. What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.”

and

“What makes Police, Adjective much stranger and more fascinating than it might have otherwise been is Porumboiu’s decision to add a slathering of academic noodling about the nature and meaning of words.”

That final extended scene where matter of ‘law,'’conscience’ and ‘morals’ are broached is one of the greatest scenes of any 2009 film. In fact, POLICE ADJECTIVE finished #6 on my own ten best list. It an oddly riveting, observational in depressed environs, and while it’s true what you say that it doesn’t reach the scathing proportions of 12:08 EAST TO BUCHAREST, it’s a police procederal with far more than just a cultural study.

I didn’t know that Treeless Mountain was partly autobiographical until I read your review. It makes me suspect that In Between Days has a similarly personal current winding through it, as it is as much about the immigrant experience as it about how awkward and awful teenage love can be.