Jerzy Skolimowski’s film Barrier, the second in this Blu-Ray set of three early features from Second Run, begins with a manifesto. A youthful man is complaining that the young are always expected to make sacrifices while the old simply accumulate wealth, and questions why it can’t be him in the […]
Poland
In The Rearview (Kinoteka 2024)(Review)
When Maciek Hamela was shooting this documentary on the roads between Ukraine and Poland there was probably still hope that this would remain a relatively short-lived war. Indeed, several of Hamela’s passengers – refugees carried in his volunteer’s van from urban and rural areas across the nation – often speak […]
Horror Story – (Kinoteka 2024)(Review)
As the feature debut of writer-director Adrian Apanel, Horror Story pulls off a nice little magic trick. When fresh-faced finance graduate Tomek (Jakub Zajac), rents a room in a crumbling boarding house that’s straight out of the horror cinema interior decorating textbook, we expect things to go full-blown supernatural (or […]
Danger Zone (Kinoteka 2024) (Review)
Doppelganger. The Double (2023) (Kinoteka 2024)
Here’s useful viewing for anyone wondering what the attitude of the Polish public towards the USSR might be almost forty five years on from the forming of Solidarity. Doppelganger. The Double is a new thriller from film-maker Jan Holoubek that’s set between the late-seventies and mid-eighties, and is currently showing […]
The Peasants / Chlopi (2023): An Innovative Combination of Historical Epic and Living Painting
Following on from the success of Loving Vincent, which utilised an innovative technique of recreating frames of recorded live-action scenes as oil paintings, DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman have found a new way of exploring their unique aesthetic. The Peasants is an adaptation of Wladyslaw Reymont’s novel of the same […]
Interrogation (1982): merciless, Kafkaesque, a two-hour pressure cooker (Blu-Ray Review)
There aren’t many home media releases where a highlight of the additional features is the transcript of a government meeting. But then, there aren’t many films with a history like Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation, released on Blu-Ray by Second Run. Second Run have previously released this film on DVD, but that […]
Andrzej Żuławski: Three Films (1971-1988): A Triptych of Trauma (Review)
Illusion (Review) (Kinoteka Festival 2023)
The Pawnshop (Kinoteka 2023 Review)
The great documentarian Molly Dineen once said her preferred subject was “anything British that’s dying”. Łukasz Kowalski’s debut film The Pawnshop, presented as part of the 2023 Kinoteka festival of Polish cinema, shows that this formula works for anything Polish as well. It’s set almost entirely within the four walls […]