Romanian film review: My Most Memorable of 2024

2024 is almost over, and before making any predictions, hopes or wishes for 2025, I will take this moment to look back and remember the pics that stayed with me most in the past months.

I will try to go in the order that I watched each, and I also included all trailers below for you to remember or just get curious. And what better way to kick off the list with a true energy ball, Tudor Giurgiu, Tudor D. Popescu and Cristian Pascariu’s Nasty. ‘Nasty’ is Ilie Năstase, the legendary, original ‘bad boy’ of tennis, and the documentary looks at the heyday of his career in the 1970s, using an impressive amount of archive material. A creative, fantastic athlete, he rose to no. 1 in the ATP rankings in 1973. His technique was surely impressive but what made the man (and the myth) was the spectacle of his game, his antics on and off the court. Năstase was a superstar and hugely popular, a prankster, a jokester, a live wire of emotions. I would have wished for a more in-depth look at the person behind the persona, but I still enjoyed the film tremendously, such great entertainment carried by Năstase’s joy and puckish troublemaking.