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

| Aug 22, 2018

[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

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

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 4, 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 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

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

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

Zbanic's deeply personal saga allows us to see the savage price that women paid in the Balkan wars.

Full Review | Feb 20, 2007

Grbavica, like its heroine, is brave enough to try to find love among the ruins.

| Feb 19, 2007

A convincing portrait of how ordinary people strive to get on with their lives in the wake of terrible conflict.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 17, 2007

Mirjana Karanovic and Luna Mijovic give powerful performances as [director] Zbanic imbues a simple story with a powerful commentary on the Bosnian war's devastating impact on the innocent. It's a lesson the world has yet to learn.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 16, 2007

[Director] Zbanic takes an effective, low-key approach, telling the intimate story of a single mother and preteen daughter who live in Grbavica, a grim neighborhood that once served as an internment camp.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 16, 2007

A striking treatise on life in post-war Bosina every bit as stark and weighty as the Italian master's [Vittorio De Sica] meditations on life in the heart and the aftermath of the madness of war.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 16, 2007

Grbavica shows that even as you leave a war behind, you bring it with you.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2007

Though in writer-director Jasmila Zbanic's gritty, affecting film the Bosnian war has been over for more than a decade, it is hardly absent in the memories of those struggling to lead normal lives amid the rubble.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 15, 2007

Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams is written and directed by Jasmila Zbanic in a stripped-down style that carries cumulative force.

| Original Score: A- | Feb 15, 2007

[Director Jasmila] Zbanic is such an acute observer of women's lives in their intimate details, and constructs such fine scenes, that I think this might be the best film to emerge from the aftermath of the Balkan conflict.

| Feb 15, 2007

The point of the film, however, is not so much the climactic revelation of Sara's true parentage, and the strangely sluggish narrative in which it is embedded, but rather the dismal day-by-day existence in postwar Sarajevo.

Full Review | Feb 7, 2007