The best Ernest Maftei’s drama movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Ernest Maftei’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Ernest Maftei.
Vlad the Impaler: The True Life of Dracula
7.5/10
Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler and Dracula, fights the Ottoman Turks on the battlefield and the Hungarian Boyars in his court.
The Punishment
8/10
In 1919 at the end of WW1 Romanian peasant Manolache Preda returns to his native village where he finds his woman taken by another and his land sold to the local landowner.
Reconstruction
7.8/10
A prosecutor, policemen and teacher bring the students Vuica and Nicu to a restaurant to re-enact their drunken brawl there, and have it filmed to show the effects of alcoholism.
The Thirst
6.7/10
The communists are taking over the boyar land and do the agrarian reform.
Meanders
7.2/10
Petru and Constantin, former faculty mates, have different views concerning their lives and professions; while the former has a bright imagination, is very creative and daring, the latter is looking only for personal comfort and material satisfaction. They contend for the same woman – but even if she loves Petru, she marries Constantin for his material condition. Though he finds in Constantin an adversary who does not hesitate to remove him, Petru will surpass him professionally.
Accident
6.6/10
Three young man run in the rain with a borrowed car. The first accident, whose victim is a girl, gives the signal for a race through the city to escape the police crews. Race ends tragically, with another serious incident, even one victim is involved. The only way out is escape. The film shows the psychological transformation of fugitives, in their desperate attempt to evade the consequences and pressures of their conscience.
Red Apples
7.5/10
In Alexandru Tatos’s debut film, a young urologist is assigned to a town hospital with no urology ward and keeps bumping up against his superiors because of both ethical and medical problems.
Then I Sentenced Them All to Death
8/10
A young boy is adopted by a priest and his wife during the Nazi occupation of Romania during the Second World War. He befriends the village idiot, who's despised by everyone else. When a German is killed in the last days of the war, the village is threatened with total destruction unless the murderer is handed over. The villagers decide to hand over the idiot.
The Soimaresti Clan
7.2/10
Vying for Principality of Moldavia's throne the descendants of Prince Stephen the Great start a bloody civil war in 1612.
Last Night of Love
7.4/10
In 1916, shortly before Romania's entry in World War One Romanian Army Lieutenant Tudor Gheorghiu is posted to a border patrol unit on Romania's border with Austria-Hungary. Not receiving any news from his wife he persuades the commanding officer, Captain Dimiu, to allow him a short leave to visit his wife. Tudor married Lena two years before but was very jealous and suspected her of infidelity. When his grandfather dies Tudor inherits most of the fortune. Gigolo lawyer Andrei Nicolau is the executor of the will. He also is the man who lustfully desires Tudor's beautiful wife. A contest for Lena's love begins. Romania is plunged into WW1 and ironically Tudor receives his junior Lieutenant commission in the same regiment where gigolo lawyer Nicolau serves as a Major. Their destinies seem intertwined.
The Convoy
6.7/10
The Axe
7.4/10
A breathtaking story in which a woman goes in search of her husband.
The Uprising
7.1/10
After years of deplorable conditions of poverty and injustice, peasants revolt against the landowners, the social elite, and police in this routine social drama. A peasant woman is raped by a lecherous wealthy lesbian, and chaos breaks out in the rural areas where the poor suffer the most from the oppressive social and economic conditions.
Mireasma ploilor târzii
5.7/10
Paul Vasiliu, a geologist, returns to his native village. Excavating for irrigation works gives him the opportunity to discover some valuable minerals. Now he has to convince the villagers to postpone theirs lifelong dream of having irrigations in their fields to examine if the mineral deposits are economically viable. A common communist propaganda item of those times.
Michael, the Dog That Sang
6.5/10
Through the Ashes of the Empire
7.7/10
A war story. survivors. refugees. few essential meetings. and great actors. a film inspired from Zaharia Stancu short story. about pain, search of sense in misty times, about roots of evil and price of survive, about a country as shadow and ruins of a empire. all in dark nuances, touching images. a movie like a ballad. heavy, strange, profound, harsh, cruel. with few drops of feelings as steps of rotten ladder. looks, silhouettes, way to ambiguous home. a thief and a young man. across Balkans. among ash of a fragile territory. the impressive aspect - silence. and gestures. the woman, the train. the escape. the bath. and the death of Diplomat. all - fragments of an old way to discover reality. all - words of a new world.
The Stone Cross
7/10
Andrei Blaier's film catches the last days of The Stone Cross a low class brothels area that became some kind of an institution in the landscape of Bucharest before the Communist period, doomed to destruction under the new rules of proletarian morals that the Communists were trying to impose. The idea could be the start of a great film, with the prostitution being seen not so much from its destructive and exploitation perspective, but rather as a form of freedom in a time when the whole society was falling under the rule of propaganda, hypocrisy, and repression. In a world due to fall under tyranny for the coming decades prostitution becomes a metaphor of the old more free way of life.
A Certain Kind of Happiness
6.6/10
A story about a group of friends and their choices, how to pursue their careers and personal life.
Uncertain Roads
6/10
Octavian Borcea, a middle aged peasant, goes through a social crisis when he decides to re-marry with a widower. He visits all his 5 children, then he returns in the village, where he burned his bridges.
Family Jewels
7.4/10
A bourgeois family life in Romania around the time of the Great Peasant Uprising of 1907.
