£4/3 Part of the excellent Romanian cinema revival, this film received the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Festival in 2006. Not to be missed. At the beginning of “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Karl Marx famously observes that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. He forgot to add that the commemoration of history can raise farce to a whole new level of absurdity. This, at any rate, is among the insights offered by the Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s acutely funny first feature, “12:08 East of Bucharest.” “Was there, or was there not, a revolution in our town?” This question (summed up in the movie’s Romanian title, “A Fost sau n-a fost?”) is asked by Mr. Jderescu (Teo Corban), a television talk-show host who has hastily assembled a panel of nobodies to look back, 16 years later, at the events of Dec. 22, 1989. Their town, Vaslui, where Mr. Porumboiu grew up, is depicted, not without affection, as a drab, rundown place where it is hard to imagine very much happening at all. Mr. Porumboiu’s film is, at first glance, as rumpled and unassuming as its weary, fatalistic inhabitants. Though it is modest, almost anecdotal, in scale, “12:08 East of Bucharest” is also characterized by a precise and sneaky formal wit. — A. O. Scott, The New York Times