Watch Love and Other Crimes For Free

Pretty Good

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely - in its own surreal way

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I don't know where to start from. Story and screenplay for example: it is as if writers read a book in psychology, especially the part which contains examples of why are people getting depressed, and then put it all together in one pathetic script. There are some questions I wanted to ask: Why does a 14-year old girl go to the top of the building twice a day to commit suicide? Is the solution for suicide attempt singing "Besa me mucho" and eating two dozens of oranges a day? Who has ever got a girl by talking of how he was masturbating watching her when they were younger? I don't know much about life of petty criminals in Serbia, but do they really kill each others pets when they don't get their 30-40 Euros of extortion money per month from local pancake shop? Why does everybody in this film sing "Besa me mucho" for so many times? Pretty likable song became very boring one. Why does everybody have to be so unhappy? They've all failed in every aspect of their lifes: family, business, love, parenthood... Some characters are just thrown in to tell their pathetic stories and prolong film for almost an hour. No sign of happiness in this one. My expectations were big but bad script and some poor performances by some good Serbian actors (the script was obviously not the inspiring one) disappointed me. In the end you don't really care about who lives or who dies (although you know it after 5 minutes). Only good thing about this waste of time are filming locations. If you want to watch good Serbian film from the last decade, watch "The Trap".

As someone else (reviewer) stated here too, after "Klopka" comes this gem of Serbian cinema. A slow moving love drama, that's not really trying to blend in.While you might think or expect conventional love drama fare, you will be treated to somewhat more complex (dare I say even more philosophical)! As stated in the summary line it won't be to anyone's taste, especially if you're more in the blockbuster area, then this won't be your cup of tea. Well I liked it and you will too, if you let yourself into the characters and don't mind one song (Besame...) being repeated a few times in the movie ...

Serbian cinema is again at the tops! This was a love story of the kind nobody else would think to put on screen. Yet it is so much more closer to those (un)happening in reality. Very sad and very deep and very simple film. Just a day of a few people in their late youth, in a Belgrade suburb of tower blocks, illustrates the throes of an entire generation caught in the postcommunist period (or shall I say, the postcommunist abyss). Leaving everything behind and starting a new life somewhere else is not as easy as we know it from the movies. Staying, on the other hand, is a limbo. But when your heart is so kind, is ever a new beginning possible?'Besa me mucho' runs a hundred times, it is the only soundtrack. The grey concrete blocks are unexpectedly beautiful, it is the only landscape. The petty post-communist gangsters are confusingly human and sympathetic, it is the main characters.Stefan Arsenijevic fairly got the director's award of the 2008 Sofia Film Festival 'for the humanity and lyricism of his style'. The other Serbian entry, 'Hadersfild', was also a very powerful film.

You may have seen my raves over Klopka from last year's Berlinale, but this year's offering was Love and Other Crimes (Ljubav i Drugi Zlocini in the original Serbian). I got excited the moment the film started rolling and I saw it starred Klopka's haunting Anica Dobra. At the end I stood up and asked, "What on earth is happening in Serbian film and how can we see MORE?" As an American, I can't help viewing the societal collapses endemic to Eastern Europe as the stimulus behind this post-modern film noir. But the director surprised me by answering my query in this vein with a note of optimism. Sure, of course, the end of open warfare is a definite positive, but to then see your society descend into the grips of common criminals in the inexorable name of capitalism, can hardly be optimistic!? I left the theater with the feeling that this particular young director had somehow surpassed himself, overreached his inherent ability. How wonderful when this is in service to art, and with the endlessly expressive face of Dobra, it is not hard to imagine this happening. Then, in further researching the film, I see a common thread -- Srdjan Koljevic, the co-writer -- and ask myself if perhaps he is the one to watch?