Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
49
2012
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
70
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
52
Blind Side
47
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
41
G-Force
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
28
Pandorum
58
Pirate Radio
39
Planet 51
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
46
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum
56
Adam
39
Adventures of Power
66
Afterschool
73
Amreeka
49
Antichrist
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The
71
Big Fan
65
Black Dynamite
76
Bliss
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
44
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star
76
Broken Embraces
70
Bronson
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
60
Collapse
82
Cove, The
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The
53
Dare
50
Defamation
67
Departures
70
Earth Days
85
Education, An
55
Endgame
88
Fantastic Mr. Fox
31
Fix
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
xx
From Mexico with Love
28
Gentlemen Broncos
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo
63
Horse Boy, The
74
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
43
Little Traitor, The
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
46
Love Hurts
84
Maid, The
45
Mammoth
75
Messenger, The
55
Missing Person, The
59
More Than a Game
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
48
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
26
Oh My God
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
79
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73
Red Cliff
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
65
Skin
41
Splinterheads
42
Staten Island
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
58
Storm
82
Sun, The
49
Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
73
That Evening Sun
61
Trucker
49
Turning Green
83
U2 3D
45
Uncertainty
67
Visual Acoustics
32
War on Kids
67
Way We Get By, The
65
Wedding Song, The
xx
White on Rice
59
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
74
Woman in Berlin, A
43
Women in Trouble
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
No Man's Land
EMAILPRINTMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corporation
Universal acclaim
Based on 29 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 26 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by: Danis Tanovic
Directed by: Danis Tanovic
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 7, 2001
DVD: April 9, 2002
Running Time: 97 minutes, Color
Origin: Bosnia-Herzegovina / Slovenia / Italy / France / UK / Belgium
Summary
RATING: R for violence and language
Starring Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Filip Sovagovic, Georges Siatidis, Serge-Henri Valcke, and Sacha Kremer
Ciki and Nino, a Bosnian and a Serb, are soldiers stranded in No Man's Land -- a trench between enemy lines during the Bosnian war. They have no one to trust, no way to escape without getting shot, and a fellow soldier is lying on the trench floor with a spring-loaded bomb set to explode beneath him if he moves. The absurdity of their situation would be comical if it didn't have such dire consequences. (United Artists / MGM)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
No Man's Land is a 98-minute wonder: this story of three men in a trench renews the meaning of the word "trenchant."
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
In the remarkable, ferociously intelligent new film No Man's Land, Bosnian writer-director Danis Tanovic gives us a movie portrait of the Bosnian War, a conflict that has devastated his country, friends and neighbors -- and found in it both shocking humor and searing, relentless tragedy.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
An absorbing, deeply affecting, well-acted --and remarkably evenhanded -- antiwar statement. It's also incredibly suspenseful and very blackly funny.
Read Full Review >New Times (L.A.) Jean Oppenheimer
Tanovic describes it as "a very serious film with a sense of humor." It is an apt description for a very remarkable film, one of the best of the year.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Almost more valuable as a piece of foreign policy than as the highly accomplished work of cinema it is.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
The film is exciting in two big ways: its simplicity of story (Tanovic does not get bogged down trying to give us an epic history) and the breadth of Tanovic's vision.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
A savage comedy about the war in the former Yugoslavia that artfully mixes comic absurdism with a passion for what's right and a concern for the individuality of all concerned.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Steven Mikulan
Tanovic steers his story away from feel-good brotherhood clichés and toward the darker reaches of human nature. The principal cast is excellent.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
A deeply serious and seriously hilarious fable of the lunacy of war.
Time Richard Schickel
All the actors in No Man's Land are wonderfully alive, fractious and unpredictable. Their performances also help break down the schematics and turn this into an emotionally potent, powerfully thoughtful and finally tragic experience.
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Fierce, funny and finally devastating, Tanovic's superb film offers a timely look at the roots of civil war and acts of terrorism on both sides that can be exploited by political and media hypocrites alike.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Begins and ends quietly, like stirrings of thunder from a distant storm. In between comes a tragedy that rolls over us like a compact hurricane.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
It's a bleakly funny parable that could be titled "Between Enemy Lines."
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
A searing, heartbreaking metaphor for the futility of war.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Like this diabolically designed weapon of war, Tanovic's film is coil-sprung to explode on the unsuspecting.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
It's a merciless and mirthlessly funny antiwar weapon from a filmmaker who has seen battle firsthand and has lived to make art from memories of hell.
Read Full Review >Variety Deborah Young
As a tyro auteur, Tanovich has a heavy-handed way of delineating characters and situations that makes this well-meaning film awfully familiar at times.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Ends on a cruel, cynical note that would surely make Billy Wilder snort with approval.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Michael Dequina
While the audience has its laughs along the way, the violent tension of war often threatens to erupt, and slowly, subtly gathering force is the film's emotional weight, which is potently felt by the film's indelible (if not exactly unexpected) concluding image.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
Writer-director Danis Tanovic, a Bosnian who spent years documenting his homeland's turmoil, makes a bold feature-film debut with this funny, sobering message movie.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Jay Carr
From beginning to end, it bristles with ironies in classic Eastern European absurdist style.
USA Today Mike Clark
Land has a lot of funny moments, which are no less serious for being so, especially when the script turns politically prickly.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Some of the film's points are made a bit too heavily, but the subject is as timely as it is timeless, and many of the performances strike a pitch-perfect balance between parody and passion.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
One of the movie's dark running jokes is that everyone seems to speak a different language and has trouble communicating. The continual struggle of people to make themselves understood becomes a metaphor for the war itself.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Patrick Z. McGavin
while the war-as-insanity metaphor clearly fits the cruel, heartbreaking story, its force is undercut by a succession of character types -- ambitious television journalists, outmatched UN peacekeepers, overbearing politicians.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
You want a happy ending? You want sunshine, sentimentality, a sense of justice and honor and duty? Me too. But you won't find it here.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
A well-mounted, macabre seriocomedy with passing punchlines. And for about half the movie, it's compelling stuff.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.5 (out of 10) based on 26 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Armond A. gave it a9:
This is a darkly comic version of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and viewers tend to ask whether its political even-handedness doesn't cause it to suffer from the same fault that plagued the old classic. To many veterans and students of "The Great War", it is wrong-headed to portray the German soldiers so sympathetically, even though many of them were indeed just poor slobs doing the dirty work of the Kaiser and his privileged court. At the screening of No Man's Land in my house, our guest was a young diplomat from Croatia who gave us insight into the mutual contribution of the Serbs and Croats to the shooting war in Bosnia. The latter country became a surrogate battleground for other breakaway Yugoslav provinces whose interests were defined by their ex-patriots living abroad. In truth there was no clear victim-villain situation, which makes the dark cynicism of the auteur more in keeping with the facts than one might think.
Amurabi M. gave it a7:
Absurdist and serious comedy of war. This is an attempt to de-mitify the war at Bosnia, covering it with a plenty of black humor. But I have a complain, why american people think that the war in Balcans was terrible and don´t act at the precise moment? I think this film is overrated because that hypocritical sentiment. It´s the triumph of the political correction over the really significant cinematographic values.
Slavisa M. gave it a6:
As I was born in Bosnia and I have lived here for all my life, I was extremely prowd when No Man's Land won the Oscar in 2002. But...I've only seen it later to see, how simple and well, simple it is. In consideration with Amelie Poulain it's a piece of cake, not worth of seing, the least. I do know that people think it's politically correct but..it's just plain simple. Nothing special.
Miko R. gave it a10:
An evenhanded look at the absurdity of our world, and the senseless ignorance that all of us are part of. And at the end of the movie, you may ask yourself "Is this what we have become", and for the life of it, you can't lie to yourself and say "no". Bitter moments of recognition for anyone who's ever been affiliated with the UN, or news TV.
Vee gave it a 10:
A poignant story.
Steve M. gave it a 9:
Joseph Heller redux!
Marta gave it a 9:
Its simplicity and humor are the best war definition.
