This is a smart, moving film, and ultimately optimistic. Hate may have the questions, but love has the answer.

| Aug 22, 2018

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 19, 2007

[Director] Zbanic makes the awful seem commonplace and vice versa, while adding ominous shadows to Esma's untold backstory. The war might be over, but fear and hope remain locked in a rapturous stranglehold amidst the rubble.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 18, 2007

Grbavica increases in power as it progresses. It's a movie about the ways in which people yearn for healing and about the many obstacles that work to prevent it.

Full Review | Original Score: B | May 18, 2007

Like its music, the film's emotions proceed from lament to screaming screed to chorus of hope.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 4, 2007

This is a slice of Bosnian life, a powerful peek at average people trying to live their average lives despite the extraordinary and unthinkable things that lie in their past.

| Original Score: B+ | May 4, 2007

Lovely in its understatement, quietly but insistently demanding that Esma's story, and those of too many other women, finally be told.

Full Review | May 2, 2007

There's really nothing new about the way Grbavica looks at the mother-daughter dynamic. But it's still refreshing to see any film that does so with such honesty and realism.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 27, 2007

Zbanic telegraphs parts of the drama a little too easily, but she draws heartbreaking performances from Karanovic and Mijovic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 27, 2007

While Grbavica concerns a legacy of hatred, it's also optimistic about Bosnia's physical and emotional reconstruction. If the film's final image doesn't move you, you'd better check your pulse.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 13, 2007

The kind of well-meaning film that actually gives well-meaning films a good name.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 11, 2007

Jasmila Zbanic also deserves our admiration for casting Karanovic, and for making a film of great power about the fate of that ultimate contradiction -- a child born out of hatred.

| Apr 9, 2007

The portrayal of a wounded society is compelling, and the film ends on a very modestly hopeful note, appropriate for a country where the 'dreams' have been mostly painful.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 30, 2007

...a little powerhouse of a movie whose slow gentle build reaches quite a stunning conclusion.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 10, 2007

The admirable feminist agenda occasionally trips up the narrative, but the film's performances keep it on track.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 9, 2007

The aftermath of the Bosnian civil war is a rich vein of storytelling material and newcomer writer/director Zbanic mines it well.

| Original Score: B | Mar 3, 2007

Grbavica is a film we watch with our heart in our mouth, wondering when, if ever, the war will end for those who lived through it and, at least physically, survived.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 1, 2007

Gbravica is a womanly movie in the best sense: [writer-director] Zbanic has a deeply feminine sense of how crisis gets filtered through the moments of daily life.

Full Review | Mar 1, 2007

The dramatic conflicts are soapy and unsubtle, but Karanovic pours intense authority into Esma's scarred psyche.

| Original Score: B | Feb 28, 2007

A poignant and emotionally gripping story of a Bosnian single parent struggling to survive in Sarajevo and carrying deep physical and spiritual wounds from the 1990s wars.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 25, 2007