Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (2023) review

Provocateur Jude offers a kind of Romanian State of the Union Address, in two (wildly uneven) parts: the first section features production assistant (and rideshare driver) Angela (Ilinca Manolache) as she battles endless traffic in Bucharest, interviews individuals injured at work and then, for "fun," runs a TikTok account where she imitates kickboxer/human trafficker Andrew Tate while the (much shorter) second part, which appears to have been done in a single take (the director admits there's a cut in there), shows the recording of an occupational safety video with a man named Ovidiu Pîrsan who was accidentally hit in the head with a pipe and confined to a wheelchair.  I recognize that there's an attempt to "link" the country's Nicolae Ceaușescu-run years with the (relatively "freer") present day - which is most notable when Jude includes footage from the 1981 movie Angela Moves On and even brings in both leads from that, Dorina Lazar and László Miske, to revisit their roles - and although there are a couple of strong moments (the sequence with the graves along the road is chilling) I still think his "connections" are a tad feeble and the film feels padded for length to make it "seem" like some grand epic.  Those seemingly never-ending driving passages - where Angela listens to music, falls asleep at the wheel or gets into shouting matches with fellow motorists - become tiresome quickly and sometimes when you try to comment on "everything," from workers' rights to real estate to social media, you end up saying very little ... except that we're all probably screwed.