Very disappointing...

Powerful

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Matko is a small time hustler, living by the river Danube with his 17 year old son Zare. After a failed business deal he owes money to the much more successful gangster Dadan. Dadan has a sister, Afrodita, that he desperately wants to see get married so they strike a deal: Zare is to marry her.I love it when films reference other films and build off of them. Here, Grga Pitić is obsessed with the last line in the film Casablanca, "this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship", which he compulsively watches on his TV set. It is so great.While maybe not the huge success "Underground" was, this is a worthy film, with plenty of dark humor and great scenes. The man hanging with an umbrella? Only here could that be funny. And then mixing in gangsters and gypsy music? Incredible.

Let me tell you before I review that I don't understand the movie's language but still loved it. I might/ should have missed lots of the language/regional stuffs present in the movie since I'm not Serbian.Emir Kusturica takes the imagination to the brink. He really did understand the life of gypsies for he has taken the movie so well. The music is cool to me (my two favorite Danube songs - Blue and Waves). The screenplay is comically written that scripts love at teens, miseries at middle age and alcoholism at old-age with two cats. Srdjan Todorovic is a superb actor (He makes me laugh every-time I see 'm on screen in this movie -- "Pitbull... Terrier") and his slapstick were too good. Few issues (just 'remote'-st ones) : The movie story doesn't make sense and movie is too much chaotic and not everyone understands the movie.

It is one of the best movies ever. This film shows, how deep Kusturica understands Gypsies!!! It is not like in Americans films where Americans are used to play Russians. It is very funny for me to watch such movies. They just don't understand Russia and their way of thinking and of course, vice versa, Russians don't understand Americans very well, although American culture is more exposed and it is easier to understand their culture.So i was very impressed by this film, but I also realized, that not everyone will appreciate this film. This film can show you if you can manage to live on Balkans. If you enjoy it, than you can come live here. If not, you will be constantly in depression and will be not happy. And I am not saying, that you have to get use to live in misery or something like that, you just have to have more different point of view and thinking. I don't think that only savages can enjoy it, I have master degree in Computer Science, I don't think I am stupid, but I still like this film very, very much. You just have to look beyond the first thing you see like violence, misery and so on.And I can say you which people will not like this film. This are people who think, that they life is the best and that everyone else must live like them. They just don't understand, that this is not true. If they see the different way of living, they start to think that those people are suffering, and that they must help them to live "better", to live like them, to have one house, two cars, social security and so on.So, I see in this film, how people can enjoy live even in a big misery and than and only than I can start enjoy this film.

Not the Director's best, in terms of gravitas, but it is not supposed to be. (refer Time of the Gypsies, Underground et al) It's a rollicking farce cutting swathes through celluloid in his own inimitable style and flare. The visuals are outstanding, direction masterful, acting great, soundtrack superb. It is a true cinematic artist letting rip like a child in a candy shop. The closest we have ever got to Fellini again, although Kustirica is clearly his own man. The Coen brothers are perhaps one of his few contemporaries.With this film he returns to his one true love: the gypsies of the Balkans, Serbia to be precise, and portrays that culture through his own romantic, humanistic, and gloriously grotesque imagination. It also encapsulates the essence of Balkan humour, evident throughout his films and also to be found in the Vox Pops 'Sarajevo diaries' made by real people trapped in Sarajevo when it was under siege during the war: irreverent, slapstick, poetic, ironic, erotic and more than anything full of the vitality of life -traits he finds most concentrated in gypsy culture.