Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man

The shadow of Soderbergh's 'Che' looms large over this stylish but tiring debut feature from Romanian new-waver Constantin Popescu. A tribute to the partisan soldiers who resisted Soviet rule in the 1950s, the film follows one such band of heavily armed, heavily bearded and largely indistinguishable freedom fighters as they roam the Romanian mountains, blagging food and shelter from the locals and getting picked off in a variety of sudden, meaningless ways. A handful of meticulously constructed set-piece battles aside, this is glum, episodic and eventually just exhausting, undermined yet further by an infuriating tendency towards crude, heavy-handed moral absolutism.