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“New Romanian cinema gains further impetus with Corneliu Porumboiu's cerebral non-thriller "Police, Adjective." With his 2006 Camera d'Or winner, "12:08 East of Bucharest," Porumboiu established himself as a witty writer-helmer with a superb ear for dialogue and an interest in the broader ramifications of truth. His follow-up, about a contempo cop's unwilling surveillance of a teen suspected of selling pot, takes things further, aiming a laser-sharp intellect and a deeply considered understanding of language at themes of authority and the residue of totalitarianism. Euro and bicoastal arthouse play is assured, though some auds may find the actionless passages taxing. (…) Porumboiu is one of the few helmers working today who so completely understands both the power of language and the power of visuals. He brings this intelligence to bear on the corrupting influence of a system that exerted control for generations, arguing that such systems die very hard deaths.

“A similar spirit of literal-mindedness guides Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, easily the best film in Cannes not screening in the main competition. (Instead, it was inexplicably relegated to a single 11 a.m. screening in the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar.) Set, like Porumboiu’s previous 12:08 East of Bucharest, in the filmmaker’s hometown of Vaslui, Police, Adjective depicts an absurdly protracted sting operation designed to catch a lone high school student in the act of selling marijuana. Cristi, the cop assigned to the case, realizes the futility of his mission, though his attempts to convince his bureaucratic superiors of the same are met with contempt, derision and the reminder that it is not his place to question the letter of the law. But it is nothing less than letters and laws — of both the legal and grammatical variety — that are the keys to Porumboiu’s wonderfully pliable, allegorical theme. For much of the running time, Porumboiu gives us a series of long, nearly wordless scenes of the cop pursuing his suspect, which turn out to be the carefully laid groundwork for a show-stopping final act of Stoppardian verbosity, as the cop and his superior engage in a verbal tennis match about conscience, personal morality and the true meanings of words.”

“Predicated on a series of routines and staged for maximum objectivity, Police, Adjective has something of the deadpan theatricality that characterized early Jim Jarmusch. But the movie is also a deadly serious analysis of bureaucratic procedure and, particularly (as presaged by the lengthy analysis of a pop song's lyrics and grammar put forth by the cop's schoolteacher wife), the tyranny of language.
Police, Adjective is the least violent movie I've seen at Cannes, but nothing has been more disturbing than its final scene, in which the cop's superior uses a dictionary and a blackboard to parse the meanings of "conscience" and "police." Images may record reality; words define it.”

“The cop movie you thought you were watching turns into an altogether different kind of investigation, one about function versus philosophy and that hinges on the reading of a dictionary. I’m not sure the definition of a word has ever been as simultaneously suspenseful and cruelly funny as it is here. The climax of “Police, Adjective” contains as much explanation as the climax of “Broken Embraces.” The difference is that Almodovar uses explication as a means to a rather monotonous end. With Porumboiu, discourse breaks the film wide open and lifts it to greatness.”

„From the country that brought us the 2007 Golden Palm winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, comes another masterwork. Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu plays inspired games with his police-procedural format, as long early scenes of real-time realism - the cop hero (Dragos Bucur) stalking and staking out a teenage drug gang - give way to a hypnotically droll climactic dialogue scene in the police chief's office. (…)If Jacques Derrida had scripted a cop movie, this would be it. The whole film is really about signs and semantics.”

„This deadpan meditation on authority and moral conscience is playing out of the main competition, despite being one of the finest films at this year’s festival.”