Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
MUBI | Release Date: March 22, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
95
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 23 Critic Reviews
Positive:
23
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Original-CinLiam LaceyApr 18, 2024
Running a digressive two hours and 43 minutes, this idea-filled absurdist comedy, presented in the fragmented visual language of social media, ties together economic inequities of the European Union, political corruption and the exploitative labour practices of foreign film productions. Also, it’s seriously funny. Read full review
100
Rolling StoneDavid FearMar 27, 2024
Do Not Expect builds on his previous film’s fractured style and broadens the range of his crosshairs, but the puckishness and past-the-boiling-point sense of wrath feels even sharper this time around. Read full review
100
The New YorkerJustin ChangMar 25, 2024
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is often breathtakingly funny, but its absurdity arises from a powerful sense of outrage—a principled disgust with the stupidity, hypocrisy, venality, and cowardice of the modern world. Read full review
100
VarietyJessica KiangMar 22, 2024
Funny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when it’s work — as in, the pitiless daily grind — that will be the death of us all. Read full review
100
SlateSam AdamsMar 22, 2024
It captures what it’s like to live in this chaotic and deadening world so well it might be the movie of the year, and last year, and next year too. If a visitor from the future wanted to know what it was like to be alive right now, this is what I’d show them. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreMar 22, 2024
Of the many things that make Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of World exhilarating, from its egalitarian mix of high and low references to its delightful profanity, what stands out is its willingness to acknowledge the general horror of modern existence, and then to suggest the only reasonable response is to laugh. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisMar 22, 2024
The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesTim GriersonMar 20, 2024
A corrosive rage courses through this 163-minute odyssey that’s matched by a leavening absurdism, Jude aghast at the comical stupidity of our inauthentic, greed-driven world. Read full review
100
The Irish TimesTara BradyMar 7, 2024
For a film with a challenging runtime, scratchy aesthetic and confrontational swagger, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World finds a pleasing rhythm and mines much absurd comedy. Welcome to the sixth stage of despair: hilarity. Read full review
100
The PlaylistAnkit JhunjhunwalaOct 18, 2023
While other directors make grand gestures about societal inequities, dating themselves with their stories and form, Jude is happy to launch a Molotov cocktail at everything that came before him. He is one of the freest filmmakers working right now—unencumbered by rules, politesse, or good taste. Contemporary malaise has rarely been captured on screen with such thrilling vividness as in Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World. Read full review
95
The Daily BeastNick SchagerOct 8, 2023
With thrilling dexterity and acerbic wit, finds a way to mock crass commercialism, cultural misogyny, corporate greed, worker exploitation, bigotry, social media hate, and the many systems and forces conspiring to crush us all. Read full review
93
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzApr 18, 2024
Weaving in footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On (a melodrama following a female taxi driver and set during the heart of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crushing reign in Romania), and capped off by an extended movie-within-a-movie contained in one static shot, Jude’s film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety. Read full review
91
IndieWireSophie Monks KaufmanMar 25, 2024
Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope. Read full review
91
The Film StageLeonardo GoiJan 11, 2024
There’s something electrifying about a filmmaker willing to treat the medium as a permeable universe, to bring it into conversation with different art forms, and to test its limits with this much inventiveness. Jude, too, moves across his material with unremitting freedom, and the voyage is a testament to cinema’s shapeshifting power––what it can do, what it can be. Read full review
90
ColliderChase HutchinsonMar 22, 2024
Expansive yet focused, it is a work that is dense in terms of its ideas while also making room for more delicate emotional notes when you least expect it to. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJul 10, 2024
Beneath all the formal sophistication and dark humor, there is a roiling anger that defines Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsMar 29, 2024
It is a bracing and chaotic and memorable experience. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineSeth KatzMar 22, 2024
The film further confirms Radu Jude as one of the most idiosyncratic, uncompromising, and intellectually vigorous of living filmmakers. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comKatie RifeMar 22, 2024
Where Jude’s previous feature, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” could be didactic at times, “Do Not Expect…” slips its knife between the audience’s ribs with such skill that the severity of the injury isn’t obvious at first. Read full review
85
Paste MagazineBrianna ZiglerOct 3, 2023
Radu Jude’s literalized mouthful Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World depicts, perhaps, the most accurate representation of the dystopia we live in, and the supposed impending dystopia that we’re in the process of arriving at. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeMar 10, 2024
This picture is more or less equal parts an indulgent, endurance-testing slog and a brilliantly audacious, fiercely political poke in the eye to conventional cinema. I loved every enraging minute of it. Read full review
80
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMar 8, 2024
Do you work to live or live to work? If you’ve got a half-decent job, it might just be the latter. For young millennial Angela, a hard-pressed PA at a Bucharest film production company in Radu Jude’s self-described tale of ‘Cinema and Economics in Two Parts’, it’s barely even the former. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerApr 4, 2024
There’s an old thesis that if your comedy is over 90 minutes, it’s probably not funny. A funny comedy should leave the audience tired from laughing by that point. That Radu Jude’s satire Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World clocks in at an epic 163 minutes should be a cause for concern – as should be the presence of bullying schlock director Uwe Boll, even in a cameo as himself. Read full review
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