Polish master Zanussi’s early work is such a uniquely irresistible and besetting experience, about a man who returns to his ancestral home after many years only to find that his family is still as dysfunctional.
A saintly donkey’s journey on acid, but Skolimowski’s elusive, fragmentary work is also earthy, as he gives us a hallucinatory, at times visually dazzling, piece that pays obvious homage to Bresson’s much sparer and more spiritual ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’.
This could very well be the first-ever Holocaust drama, about a group of resilient women who must attempt to survive during the last months of the war, startlingly shot on location at Auschwitz, with many cast and crew who survived the concentration camps.
Skolimowski’s raw debut feature is like a Polish ‘Breathless’, though much less interesting and with little to really engage viewers.
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.
Eternality Tan 