Reviews

It's hard to figure out what this movie's biggest flaw is: bad script, bad director, too predictable. The intro is excellent, but it goes downhill quickly. Will Smith is charismatic, but he hasn't got much to work with here. Tcheky Karyo gives the strongest performance as the ruthless villain, but one actor can't save an entire film.

I can't believe this terrible film was made by the same people who made Lepa Sela Lepo Gore. Watch that and skip this. The plot is muddled and the characters are mostly two-dimensional stereotypes. I suspect the editor went on vacation halfway through the film because quick, choppy cuts start to appear that only confuse matters rather than elucidate them. The ending doesn't make sense either.

This is predominantly a propaganda film made so Serbs can feel sorry for themselves and vilify America for the NATO bombings of 1999. They do this by perpetuating lies about Serbs being our allies during WWII, claiming the whole world is unjustly against them, and completely ignoring everything said and done by Slobodan Milosevic, like waging war on three neighboring countries. They seem intent on making a political film but only show a few seconds of Milosevic on a TV screen with no sound. A nationalist agenda obviously superseded any consideration of art which was not the case with Lepa Sela.

Regrettably, I recommended this film to a teacher when it played last week at the Seattle International Film Festival. He also cited the bad editing and confusing plot, and I had to apologize for the bad advice. You've been warned.

The cinematography is stunning, and it's worth seeing just for that. Like many of the war films coming out of the Balkans, this one can be a bit confusing. It's not a simple, linear narrative, but this serves the film. War and trauma are disorienting, terrible, and occasionally funny in their dark absurdity. The central character is oddly charismatic, and his wanderings are spellbinding. Unlike so many Hollywood films, we have no idea where this guy's going or how it will all end. Nola succeeds in transporting viewers into a strange new world, and films don't get much better than that.