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Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

War in Georgia, Apkhazeti region in 1990. An Estonian man Ivo has stayed behind to harvest his crops of tangerines. In a bloody conflict at his door, a wounded man is left behind, and Ivo is forced to take him in. Mandariinid is another god awful and just slow paced drama that doesn't belong on this list at all. The acting was dumb, the characters were very boring and just the entire scenario was very disappointing to see. Overall a movie that will not really affect you that much but you won't even be remember the next hour or the next 15-20 minutes. (0/10)

Although I understand why "Tangerines" is a public favorite, I can't really get aboard the hype train regarding this Estonian-Georgian production.Whichever good intentions had the director Zaza Urushadze on producing this anti-war statement, they were lost within a very timid plot, which lacks the confidence to set itself free from all the conventions of this kind of story.I found "Tangerines"'s plot utterly clichéd, predictable, emotionally manipulative, and its characters were carved paper thin. I don't demand intricate stories to tell such simple, yet important lessons like the futility of war, but there's a difference between simplicity and predictability.The great interpretations from the cast (especially from Lembit Ulfsak (Ivo) and Giorgi Nakashidze (Ahmed)) and the compelling visuals of "Tangerines" can't save the film from its thin argument, and even though I don't doubt Urushadze's integrity to tell a story that touches such sensible topics from Estonia's recent History, he can't turn it more compelling than any given Hollywood war movie.

War certainly never changes. And no matter what reasons make people leave their regular lives and go kill each other, it all boils down to the blind rage and bloodthirstiness. There are no noble causes, no right and wrong, just "us" and "them" and killing them before they kill us.The ugliness of all this mess is best noticed when put against the pure beauty of the land the people are fighting for. Against the nature that knows no war and against people who only wanna live in harmony with it and reap what the land yielded for them. And that's the essence of the story behind Tangerines: a dying Estonian settlement in the Caucasus region, with only a few people left who try to gather the tangerines while there is still time, while the war breaks all around them about which country this land should belong to.The beauty of Tangerines is in its simplicity. It doesn't try to judge, to separate right from wrong, to label people for what made them go to that war - money or duty. It cares for none of it. The only thing that matters is that we are all human, and killing each other is a pointless and senseless thing per se. That the person you are so desperately trying to kill today might become your only friend tomorrow. Because that's what war does: it makes everybody blind, and the only way to start seeing again is to reject it altogether.The naivety of that pacifist message may be endearing, but it also demands for an oversimplification. Preaching peace is only possible if you ignore all the complexities that led to the war in the first place. In fact, Tangerines tries a bit too hard to avoid any complexities at all, nipping them in the bud. Why are the Abkhazians fighting for their independence? Why are the Georgians so eager to keep them from getting it? Why are the Russians and their blood money involved? Why is Ivo so reluctant to leave his village and move to Estonia to his family? What will he do when the rest of the settlers leave? The answers to these questions are either blurred or not even hinted at, as if the whole world has suddenly shrunk to these two Estonian guys, their unexpected guests and a tangerine garden.And while that reclusiveness - both physical and spiritual - may be a powerful personal stance, it deprives Tangerines of a certain cinematographic depth. Of course, there may be no obvious solutions to all the big problems of our world, especially when it comes to war, but sometimes it's simply not enough to put a flower into a barrel of a rifle to fix it all. Even if it's a tangerine blossom.

(major spoilers)Directed and written deftly by Zaza Urushadze, "Tangerines" is one of the best foreign movies I've seen in the last several years. It certainly is one of the best anti-war movies I've ever seen. Urushadze succeeds in his theme so well because he does not pull punches at all. Without giving away specifics too much it is a sharply written character drama with Lembit Ulfsak anchoring as a needed patriarch and mentor for war-torn foes, both Chechnyans and Georgians. Ulfsak's character's language is simple and sparse, though the real journey is for the Ahmed character, who by the end of the movie has an emotional enlightening, and through this we are wrenched with sorrow.