For the Royal Ballet's exquisite star Alina Cojocaru her dream is performing some of the most physically demanding movements ever devised for a human being - for a paralysed 52-year-old man in Romania, the dream is to go to the park and look at the sky. Cojocaru's dream is realisable; Marius's is not. Romania is not a country where you would want to be ill, says the ballerina of her native land.

The Romanian New Wave continues producing cinema with a visceral power that’s hard to match anywhere in Europe, though to say it was alive and well would hit the wrong note, given the bleakness of the world it goes on depicting. Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007 for 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, his lacerating abortion story set in Ceaucescu’s Romania, and last year his Beyond the Hills took high honours there again - the best screenplay and best actress awards, the latter shared between its two newcomer leads, Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan.

Three hours is a testing length for any film. Directors may stretch to that because they’re telling a huge story with plenty of plots and characters, but in Aurora, Romania's Cristi Puiu pares down plot, such as it is, to an absolute minimum. Elements of semi-documentary set in, as we watch his hero Viorel (played by Puiu himself in his first screen role) move disaffectedly through contemporary Bucharest.

Just as you think you’ve got Tuesday, After Christmas pegged as an Eric Rohmer-style relationship drama, it gradually becomes clear it’s something else. The impact left by this ambiguous, non-judgmental examination of the emotional crisis affecting a married man and those around him is a result of its measured approach and deft sensitivity. Less about the dialogue, it’s more about interaction and nuance.

The tourist bumf talks a lot about Bucharest being “Little Paris”. If you squint while walking down the grand boulevards, you see what they mean. The crumbling Byzantine churches, the Belle Époque restaurants, the odd palatial Beaux-Arts town houses among the brutalist blocks all evoke Paris. They even have their own Arc de Triomphe and Odéon Theatre here, built on Parisian models. But don’t make a habit of squinting your eyes, as you are liable to fall down one of the myriad holes in the pavement.

A bold wave of dark, tense films has been crashing into international perception from Romania for some years. When, shall we say, traditionally under-performing cultures throw up interesting new things, it’s hard to say precisely why. It just happens.

A bold wave of dark, tense films has been crashing into international perception from Romania for some years. When, shall we say, traditionally under-performing cultures throw up interesting new things, it’s hard to say precisely why. It just happens.

When an unknown Romanian director won the Palme D'Or in Cannes, you might say that it upset the applecart. Mungiu had made one small previous feature, and his winning film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, was written and shot in less than a year. His, truly, was a meteoric, overnight, astonishing success. But this was two years ago. What did Mungiu do next?