Essentially a chamber-drama allegory, writer-director Zaza Urushadze's Tangerines takes its title from its setting — a war-defiled grove of citrus trees in Georgia — and is powered by casually great, lived-in acting, particularly from Lembit Ulfsak as the old man under whose roof a gruff Chechen mercenary (Giorgi Nakashidze) and his sensitive young Georgian foe (Mikheil Meskhi) find themselves facing off. Being a heart-on-sleeve humanist, Urushadze doesn't get into the particulars of the civil war in question, as if not to dignify them. Being also an Eastern European, he very helpfully doesn't dignify sentimentalism either.
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