Films in the Polish language
CertificationPG
Our Rating
Part 1 of Wajda's trilogy of wartime films, the hopeful one, is set in Wola, a working-class area of Warsaw in 1942, and deals with the graduation of a bunch of semi-delinquent street kids, through individual acts of defiance and courage, into a youth resistance group. The heroism is not simple, neither loyalties nor self-sacrifice are assured, but united they will be.
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Certification12
Our Rating
The last of Wajda's famous trilogy, the one that signifies despair, has Cybulski, the 'Polish James Dean', as a young fighter no longer killing Germans but instructed to assassinate a recently appointed communist official. His deepening love affair with a hotel barmaid has him starting to question the value of his struggle. Superb.
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Certification12
Our Rating
A hybrid science fiction movie from Manga Man, Mamoru Oshii. Set in a dystopian future, the young inhabitants of an anonymous Eastern European state (well, it might be Poland...) have become dangerously addicted to a virtual reality game called Avalon. Ash, a lone player who lives a solitary existence begins to get drawn deeper and deeper into the game and before long it becomes unclear as to whether she can ever find her way back, or whether she wants to for that matter. Using tinted monochrom
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Certification15
Our Rating
Made in a still Communist Poland, Kieslowski's film offers three alternative outcomes for a young man at a train station; In the first he catches the train and is converted to communism by an old Marxist; In the second he misses his train, is imprisoned and falls in with some dissidents and in the third he misses his train, gets married, becomes a doctor and leaves politics to those who care. An intriguing, thoughtful and occasionally witty meditation on the fickleness of fate.
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Certification12
Our Rating
When Filip buys an 8mm camera with which to record the birth of his child little does he know of the moral maize he has inadvertently entered. Invited by his bosses to record on film the companies 25th anniversary, Filip is delighted when he wins an award at a local festival and is spurred on to record every aspect of his public and private life. The naivety of Filip's new found passion soon brings tension both at work and home and it is not long before he begins to realise the influence that hi
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Certification15
Our Rating
A passionate love story between two people of different backgrounds and temperaments, who are fatefully mismatched and yet condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, the film depicts an impossible love story in impossible times. find out more...
Certification15
Our Rating
Certification15
Our Rating
The first 5 of a series of 10 critically acclaimed films, all of which take place in the same Warsaw apartment block and focus on the complexities of human relationships. The first deals with the relationship between a father and son and the second with a doctor forced to play God. In the third Janusz is persuaded by a woman to drive all over town in search of her husband. In the fourth Anka's relationship with her widowed dad is challenged when she finds a letter showing he may not be her real
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Certification15
Our Rating
Janusz is persuaded by a woman to drive all over town in search of her husband. Anka's relationship with her widowed dad is challenged when she finds a letter showing he may not be her real dad. A young man brutally murders a taxi driver and is hung by the state - shot in heightened-realist style.
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Certification15
Our Rating
An older woman has an ill-fated affair with a lad she catchs peeping on her. A fifty year old woman kidnaps a child and disappears to her lover's cabin in the woods. A professor tells a tale of a Catholic couple who deny a Jewish boy who needed a baptism certificate to survive in occupied Warsaw.
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Certification15
Our Rating
An older woman has an ill-fated affair with a lad she catchs peeping on her. A 50-year old woman kidnaps a child and disappears to her lover's cabin in the woods. A professor tells a tale of a Catholic couple who deny a Jewish boy who needed a baptism certificate to survive in occupied Warsaw.
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Certification15
Our Rating
A promiscuous surgeon is told by his doctor that he can no longer have sex (AIDS?) and is forced to reassess his relationship with his wife. A much lighter more comic last tale as two brothers find a valuable stamp collection in their dead dad's flat and turn it into Fort Knox. True art cinema.
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Certification15
Our Rating
Certification12
Our Rating
When a sewer worker discovers a group of Jews living under the streets of war torn Poland he immediately sees a profit to be made. But as the war rages, the opportunist’s humanity begins to consume him and his desire to provide safe haven for these people becomes his only focus. In Darkness is an incredibly well made and atmospheric dramat find out more...
Certification18
Our Rating
After a one-night stand with a military officer, a cabaret singer is imprisoned by the secret police, without ever being informed of her alleged crime. For the next five years, she is subjected to harrowing torture and harassment, which she doggedly withstands in a struggle to maintain her dignity and sanity. Interrogation was banned by the Polish government for being 'inflammatory and dangerous'. Years later director Bugjaski smuggled a copy out of the country where it debuted at Cannes in 1990
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Certification12
Our Rating
Part 2, and surely the greatest, of Wajda's trilogy describes the last days of the failed 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis. The imagery of the sewers, to which the Polish fighters retreat, is superbly used to represent both their desperation and their new Soviet prison. Made in 1956 despite Stalinist censorship.
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Certification15
Our Rating
Based on the novel 'Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn' by Andrzej Mularczyk this film tells the horrific story of the 1940 Soviet NKVD's massacre, and subsequent cover-up, of an estimated 22,000, mainly Polish, military officers, police and intellectuals. Rarely does a film about the horrors of organised genocide achieve in its representation such an honest and harrowing account of crimes against humanity.
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CertificationPG
Our Rating
Polanski's first, and arguably his finest, feature film is an economically brilliant exercise in tension. Sparse of cast and props, the atmosphere grows painfully taut as a young couple on a yachting trip and the hitcher they've picked up engage in ever more dangerous emotional games.
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Certification12
Our Rating
Housing former Polish prisoners, the landscape refered to in the title is that of a concentration camp. Following the Second World War, this is a careful and painfully close study of humanity and the emotional impact of the horrors experienced. Wadja avoids creating easy answers for his characters and avoids sentimentality. What you get therefore is a hard-hitting and unrelenting analysis of human deprivation. Powerful stuff.
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CertificationPG
Our Rating
Wajda's slice of Polish history takes the form of an inquiry by a young film graduate into the fate after reward, retribution and rehabilitation of a 50s 'worker's hero', a record breaking bricklayer. Film as evidence is stripped of its authority, monochrome flashbacks represent propogandist archive footage as Wajda builds his detection story. A classic piece of film making.
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