"This wicked, uproarious Georgian anti-bureaucratic satire is set in a publishing house whose fusty, over-crowded rooms and corridors would not disgrace Gogol or Dickens. Behind these crumbling walls (literally so, as nasty cracks start to appear in the ceiling) work a devious group of editors and scribes, obsessed more with their own affairs, business meetings and lunches than with the fate of manuscripts left by aspiring authors. Eldar Shengelaya maintains a beautifully judged tone throughout, pointed and sly, and rarely allows the players to topple over into farce. Witty conceits abound: the casual meetings with people stuck in a recalcitrant lift, the mysterious basement room whose occupant never answers, the editor who delivers regular diatribes without realizing that he is repeating himself. A visit by a group of noisy singers and dancers finally brings the decrepit building crashing round their ears, but not before Shengelaya has worked some wonderful variations on his characters' sloth and guile." John Gillett, London Film Festival (also shown at the San Francisco International Film Festival at PFA, 3/86).