The love story is painfully corny, and so are the murder scenes and most of the acting performances, especially the interpretation of Katarina, a character loosely based on Lady Macbeth, by Olivera Markovic, an actress who is easy on the eyes but seems capable of only two modes, a flat mode during which she expresses nothing and a histrionic mode during which she hams it up, but if you're an aficionado of fine cinema, you may nonetheless want to see Polish director Andrzej Wajda's adaptation of Nikolai Ljestov's story "Lady Macbeth of Mzensk District," partly to enjoy Dusan Radic's ominous and overwrought musical score, which is based on motifs from Dimitri Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of Mzensk," but mostly to marvel at Aleksandar Sekulovic's masterful black-and-white film-noir cinematography, cinematography that simultaneously emulates Eisenstein's ALEXANDER NEVSKY and Weegee's "Naked City," artistically composed and highly dramatic cinematography that conveys the stark, windswept barrenness of life in the remote Russian village where the story takes place and makes the gnarled peasant extras who play the villagers the real stars of the movie.