Emir Kusturica conjures up another outrageous, sprawling epic after his Cannes prize-winning Underground. He returns to the world of Gypsy life on the Danube, again filming largely with nonprofessional actors. A fable of two patriarchs and their feuding families, the larger-than-life tale combines a high-energy crime caper with some intricate shenanigans surrounding an arranged Gypsy wedding. Overflowing with bizarre images like car-eating pigs, ice-packed corpses, and living tree stumps, the film blends the surreal and the real. This is an intensely physical, slapstick black comedy-the kind of thing the Marx Brothers might have cooked up had they been imbued with a more morbid and outré taste for catastrophe.-Joel Shepard