This character-driven drama is so gripping because every actor is so good, with each making archetypes - the nasty stepfather, the angry husband, the rich gentleman - that transcend their familiarity.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 13, 2018

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

| Original Score: A- | Sep 7, 2011

Offers an uncanny soap opera story that turns weird.

| Original Score: B | Aug 16, 2011

The movie begins with a flood that threatens Prague literally; it ends with a flood of emotions that threaten to undermine a potentially happy relationship.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 17, 2009

All the characters in Petr Jarchovsky's screenplay are drawn in shades of gray. The result isn't so much a morality play as an amorality play.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 10, 2009

Excellent ensemble dramedy, which avoids mawkishness while keeping its characters complex and treating even the least likable of them with a welcome degree of empathy.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 4, 2009

While this seems like familiar territory, in the hands of director Jan Hrebejk and his longtime screenwriting partner, Petr Jarchovsk, it's an engrossing, layered story of the ill-fitting choices and compromises everyone makes.

| Apr 3, 2009

The filmmakers seem more interested in running the camera over Marcela's body than really figuring out who she is.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 20, 2009

Beauty in Trouble uses another kind of catastrophe to reveal the true nature of its central characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2009

Petr Jarchovs's script is elliptical, building the story through a succession of small scenes whose import is not always immediately obvious.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 9, 2009

[A] well-observed tale, one with no heroes or villains, just people trying to make something of the situations in which they find themselves.

| Original Score: B | Dec 19, 2008

For a class-conscious farce that's at least serious enough to borrow its title from Robert Graves, it's impressively unaffected and utterly watchable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 18, 2008

Impressive for its mastery, intelligence, and ambition in juggling intricate plot strands and memorable characters.

| Dec 9, 2008

This is the kind of film that achieves one simple but difficult thing: It pleases you.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 9, 2008

Comedy and chemistry make for an intoxicating mix in this acerbic, knowing character study from Czech director Jan Hrebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 18, 2008

Characters burst out laughing in the middle of sadness or decide to have sex in the middle of a fight, and somehow, it all makes sense.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 10, 2008

Deeply affecting and darkly amusing.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 1, 2008

It's enthralling, human drama of the kind that's become sort of an old school pleasure.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2008