Synopsis
Somewhere in the Balkans, 1995. A team of aid workers must solve an apparently simple problem in an almost completely pacified territory that has been devastated by a cruel war, but some of the local inhabitants, the retreating combatants, the UN forces, many cows and an absurd bureaucracy will not cease to put obstacles in their way.
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Cast
- Benicio del ToroMambrú
- Tim RobbinsB
- Olga KurylenkoKatya
- Mélanie ThierrySophie
- Feđa ŠtukanDamir
- Eldar RešidovićNicola
- Sergi LópezGoyo
- Nenad VukelićNikola's Grandfather
- Morten SuurballeUN Official at the Briefing
- Ben TempleUN Official's Assistant
Recommendations
- 75
New York Daily News
Director de Aranoa keeps things moving, though, with a firm sense of pace and a rough, punk-edged soundtrack. - 70
Screen Daily
The humanity of the enterprise, hovering between sympathy and ironic detachment, keeps the script on course, delivering a story that for all its motley-band-of-brothers clichés feels as authentic as many more pious takes on the Bosnian conflict. - 70
Village Voice
A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance. - 63
Slant Magazine
The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare. - 60
The Guardian
Inconsistency is A Perfect Day’s biggest problem. The script is scalpel sharp in some places, flabby as the well-blocker in others. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
While it's uneven, A Perfect Day builds to a nice melancholy conclusion. It underscores with gentle strokes the frustration and disillusionment of self-sacrificing workers confronted on a daily basis with feelings of futility in the face of corruption and compromise. - 60
The Telegraph
When the film gets going, it’s hard not to be bustled along with it, thanks mostly to León de Aranoa’s talent for punchy comic dialogue – doubly impressive, given this is his first English-language picture – and the plot’s habit of thwarting your expectations as to where the most morally upstanding course of action might lead. - 60
Variety
By the end, thanks to Leon de Aranoa’s steady direction and the actors’ slow-building character work, “A Perfect Day” manages to coalesce into a reasonably tough-minded, compassionate vision of the difficulties and rewards of trying to do the right thing in an intractable situation, though the film has to overcome more than a few flat, indolent stretches to get there.
