"The audience favorite at this year's Festival of Yugoslav Films in Pula was a (cinematic valentine, a bright and colorful) nostalgia piece set in Belgrade in the 1950s. The story unfolds...following the great Tito-Stalin divorce of 1948, focusing on the growing pains of a group of young, dispossessed bourgeois lads, and the beautiful object of their affections, Esther. The villain of the piece is an unaccomplished Party man who succeeds in coming between Esther and the suitors from her own class, and leaving her pregnant into the bargain. But in betrayal the boys don't abandon her, and when she needs them most they gallantly deliver her in a way that changes the course of all their lives. Neatly framed by Esther's funeral many years later, Acin's autobiographical feature is confidently directed, evocatively shot by veteran cinematographer Tom Pinter, and its delicate honesty and humor come as a welcome breeze of fresh air into a national cinema marked normally by a harsh and brutal realism." Mike Downey