The overt nature of the [final] scene is a perfect example of why Porumboiu is the foremost miserablist of his [Romanian] New Wave colleagues. It lends Police, Adjective a complementary affinity to Kafka’s style of bullishly grinding his characters into the ground with the absurdity of the police states that his stories comment on.
— Simon Abrams (Slant Magazine)
The script’s tone of deadpan, yet escalating, ridicule and exasperation plays out a little like a post-Eastern Bloc riff on Curb Your Enthusiasm (or the rhetorical banter of Willie and Eddie in Stranger Than Paradise [1984]).
— Steve Dollar (Paste Magazine)
The information that’s meted out is discarded as frequently as it’s of any use, and it’s the ultimate squandering of this superfluous knowledge—the occupations of the suspect’s parents, the cars driven by the squealer’s family, the shabby tenement where the third member of the trio lives, the furnishings of the modest apartment that Cristi returns home to—that’s Porumboiu’s biggest failure of nerve: To critique totalitarianism is easy, to critique what comes after it, as class tensions shift and realign during the move to liberal capitalism, requires real conviction.
— Phil Coldiron (Slant Magazine)
Synopsis: A cop named Cristi must go undercover to trail teen Victor who is suspected of selling pot in the north-eastern city of Vasliu.