How Bad Is the AI Dracula Movie?

There is, as anyone who has attended a film festival or repertory cinema screening of a classic foreign film can attest, a kind of laughter that pervades such dark spaces. It is a knowing laughter: signaling the recognition of a joke, more than an involuntary spasm of amusement that a joke might otherwise merit. Polite, and a little forced, it’s the golf-clap of guffaws. Radu Jude, the 40-something Romanian writer-director whose movies have, of late, become fixtures of the festival and art house circuits, does not elicit this kind of laughter. Vulgar, crass, and at times unbelievable, Jude’s films gin up laughs from deep in the guts. His movies are, in other words, actually funny.