If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

a Kadare's adaptation. who preserves the colors of lines, the light of phrases, the bitter splendor of small things. a film about family, duty and sacrifice. simple. touching. seductive because it presents just pillars of life without the desire to be more than a sketch. and becoming convincing portrait of a rural Brasil, a poor family, a shirt and its colors, a love story and a wise boy who change his world. the performances. the landscapes. the cinematography. each as a gem. for present a story who is only portrait of life. nothing new. only an old story from an Albanian writer. becoming a Brazilian movie as a kind of bridge of basic essential things.

I bought this film by chance to give myself a shot of culture, and wasn't really expecting it to live up to much. I had never heard of it before, but I liked the cover and the story sounded OK. However, I was in for a real treat. Beautifully shot against Brazilian landscapes and told through a cast of tremendously talented actors, especially, and most surprisingly, Rodrigo Santoro, of Love Actually fame. However, it is the little boy who really steals the show. He is fantastic and will have you reaching for the Kleenex. The beautifully told relationships between the families and the drama of the feuds just makes this film one of the best foreign films ever, and, if you can be bothered to read subtitled films, this is one you won't regret getting. It is really that good, and the cinematography is astounding. Sorry to keep talking in hyperbole, but it really is phenomenal.

This story runs parallel with the way most people live nowadays. Our spontaneity is almost drained from us by our responsibilities. At the time i saw this film i felt like everyday was banal, and everything i did was routine. It takes courage to break from the banality of the quotidian and be free of constraints. Sometimes there are things you just know...Tonio offered a truce with the other family partly because he was afraid to die but mostly because he saw the blindness and stupidity that the tradition brought with it. Born into a tradition you are expected to live by it's rules regardless of whether you are doing the right or the wrong thing. How often nowadays to we see ourselves in a situation that we know is wrong but be have no control over. It became apparent that Tonio saw things differently when he took his brother to the circus. At least it would make his brother happy and make him and his brother feel a small amount of freedom. After all they were almost "like the oxen"...drones. But even the oxen collapsed due to the stringent demands of Tonio's Father. This shows that sometimes it is impossible to meet expectations. You can't expect Tonio to embrace the fact that he was going to be hunted down and killed, and his brother was going to be next. There is so much that can be said but i'll leave it at that...

Utter brilliance, the most beautiful movie I've seen since Amelie from Montmartre. How this movie is fairly unknown is a mystery to me.I cried repeatedly through the latter half of the movie. Not from the sadness in the story, but from the beauty of it. Not many movies leave such marks, me and the person I watched it with talked about it for hours after seeing it.I'm shocked to see this movie "only" got 7.5 here on IMDB. It deserves WAAY more. I would expect it to be around the 8.5 mark. 10/10 from me though, I'm blown away.