Interesting and meditative in its treatment of the metaphysical in the real world, this Polish work, however, is vague about what it wants to say as a mysterious Ukrainian massage therapist works his charm on a gated community of oddball residents.
Despite the historical importance of the subject matter, Wadja’s personal film is surprisingly uninvolving for long stretches.
Wajda’s first feature is a modest story of sorrow and youth resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, promising great things to come for one of Poland’s greatest filmmakers.
This late-career effort by the Polish master feels tonally odd, but it gives a broad and largely engaging look at Poland’s most important figure during the Solidarity movement of the 1980s that sparked the decline of Soviet communist rule.
Zulawski’s unfinished sci-fi epic, disrupted by the then Communist Polish government, about the perils of forming a new civilisation on an inhospitable planet is manic, ambitious if somewhat befuddling filmmaking at its best, rendered generously with jump cuts, astonishing imagery and the commitment to highly-physical performances.
Kieslowski’s most political film takes a look at activism, law and ghosts through two parallel but related stories, but it doesn’t quite achieve the transcendence of his later pictures.
Good but not great, this handsomely-mounted biopic about a Welsh journalist’s news-breaking report on the Ukrainian famine of the early ‘30s under Stalin is a welcome introduction to a murky and disturbing part of 20th-century history.
Love, forgiveness and redemption weigh heavily in this Oscar-nominated religious-based drama about a young sinner who unexpectedly poses as a priest in a small Polish town.
A disturbing and occasionally powerful look at youths with suicidal tendencies through the off/online realms that they inhabit.
This precise drama by one of Poland’s foremost female directors is wryly comic if also conceptually peculiar as it explores grief and the afterlife against a father-and-daughter narrative.
Eternality Tan 