The language of law, as witnessed and experienced by police, supervisors, and “criminals,” is dissected in this extraordinary new work, both cop film and philosophical essay on linguistics and law, from the director of the acclaimed 12:08 East of Bucharest. Cristi is a decent beat cop tailing a clueless, particularly unthreatening teenager around town; “busy” blending into fences and crumbling walls, Cristi has plenty of time to ponder why his supervisors are unleashing the full weight of the law against an ordinary teen who's been accused (without proof) of having “offered” pot, once. The film's first half, shot outdoors along the potholed streets of contemporary Romania, is a post-communist The Wire, quietly documenting a society halfway between ruin and repair; the final section, a bravura long take of Cristi's confrontation with his supervisors (and, incidentally, one of the best-acted scenes in recent cinema), opens up into something more surprising, a philosophical examination of how the language of law is defined-and controlled, by those in power-through the laws of language.