15

This is the worst film I've seen for as long as I can remember. It isn't even worth a thorough comment/review. Nicolaescu is obviously a delusional character (interesting - or better said, funny - to note that when the film was released he appeared completely drunk on the news, giving an unimaginably incoherent interview); I did expect something very cheesy but this just blew me away. Nothing is good in this film: incredibly bad acting, bad script, bad directing, you name it. This can't be considered a historical film. This film is a bad joke. "Rambo" is a historical masterpiece compared to this thing. The fact that this film was funded by the state (!!!!!!!!) should raise some eyebrows...

If you like movies with happy ending, don't watch this one. Is an dramatic movie about the Romanian revolution from 1989. For someone who didn't knew how it was back then, this is an awful movie, but for someone who lived the moments and lost someone (the wife of a fiend) who was murdered only for being in the wrong place at a wrong time, is an disturbing film who tried to show an unseen face of the events. In essence, the story is divided in two. One part is taking place in 1989 when a marine officer comes to Timisoara to marry his pregnant girlfriend, but ends being shot and taken to a crematory where it is burned alive. Meanwhile, his girlfriend gives birth to a boy on the stairs of the Cathedral in Timisoara. The other part of the movie take place in 2004, 15 years after, when a Romanian journalist who lived in France for the last 15 years, wants to write an article about that boy found on the stairs of the Cathedral in 1989 and tries to find that boy. This is it.

I went to the cinema to see this one, but I left after almost an hour. I learned my lesson after watching Orient Express and I did't stay for the whole thing again. Unlike Clint Eastwood who makes great movies at his age, Sergiu Nicolaescu just got old and makes movies that only he and people who remember the "good old times" like. Sergiu did make a few good movies "at his time", but it's time to stop and maybe help others. This movie, 15, is as bad as it gets, don't waste your time and even if you have nothing to do but watch this movie, do nothing! I'm not sure how the script for this movie ever won an award, because it's awful, it's got nothing new and some of the worse character lines I've ever heard. The cast is good, but without a director it all falls apart.... I saw a few comments by people who liked the movie. The only way someone can say 15 was a good movie is if that someone worked on the production of this movie or hasn't seen it. Because everyone I know curses the time spent watching this movie.

I expected this movie to be just another political thriller/drama from Sergiu Nicolaescu but instead I got a character story in the background of the '89 Romanian Revolution, plus an almost more grabbing subplot about a newspaper story of the 15 years since the Revolution. The main actor, Cristian Iacob does a very good job, as well as Maia Morgenstern & Florin Chiriac. The film itself is more like the old movies of Sergiu Nicolaescu with a lot of tragic situations, memorable characters (like the driver played by Valentin Teodosiu), a slight amount of violence... Very recommended. 9 out of 10.

P.S. 15 doesn't mean the 15 years that have passed, but something else;).

It seems that 15 it's a film raising some very serious questions about how cinema may be a source of coping with our recent history. Is 15 - a film that evokes the days of the Romanian Revolution from December 1989 which led to the new achieved Romanian democracy - a good piece of cinema because it brings back those tragic moments? For me, this film is a failure. Not a complete failure, but still a failure. The film implies an emotional impact on those who know what the December '89 Revolution was all about: the journalist who comes, after 15 years, to Romania, to find a child who was born during those days, a journalist who is searching for the way Romanians dealt with the moment they gained their freedom. Unfortunately, the technique spoils this whole idea: the sound and the music are appalling, the dialogues are artificial, the shooting is dull. They really make this film un-watchable and make you wonder on the so-called "great Romanian directors"...