Metacritic reviews

Managing to be at once epic and intimate, Zelary matches a resilient urban woman against a compassionate rural man in the spectacular Moravian countryside during World War II. Results rep a triumph of regional filmmaking, but in the David Lean tradition.

It has a familiar, lived-in feel, and if its observations of rural life at a time of political turmoil don't feel terribly original, they are nonetheless absorbing and sometimes powerful.

It's a convincing romantic drama, written, directed and acted with so much skill it's able to break loose from its conventional moorings and become more effective, more moving than we anticipated.

Well acted, handsomely photographed, a bit too long.

Zelary succeeds as moving indictment of war.

The story feels a bit more episodic as it proceeds, but for most of the two-hour running time it flows at an earthbound tempo, thanks to Trojan's assured, unobtrusive direction.

The tension with which the picture starts soon dissipates, the contrast between Eliska's background and her present place is lost, and the film plods into a tale of village life, spiced only occasionally with a hint of German threat.

The fact that it's based on a true story doesn't make it feel any less trite.

It's rather sweet and life-affirming, although the transformation from sophisticate to peasant happens too conveniently and quickly.

Zelary strands its protagonists in a hermetically sealed world where time runs in place. It's a feeling that viewers of this two-and-a-half-hour epic will come to know all too well.