Kinoteka 2015: ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ review
★★★★★ In 1956 there was a seismic political shift in Poland known variously as the Polish Thaw or Polish October. The Stalinist period ended...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In Kinoteka.
25 May 2015
Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Promised Land’ review
★★★★★ It has been sixty years since the release of Andrzej Wajda’s first film, Generation (1955), and in that time he has directed over...
25 May 2015
Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Last Day of Summer’ review
★★★★☆ Novelist turned filmmaker Tadeusz Konwicki excelled at crafting an atmosphere of the otherworldly on the screen. Though 1965’s Jump may be more widely...
25 May 2015
Kinoteka 2015: ‘Austeria’ review
★★★★☆ There’s a moment of cinematic perfection around forty minutes into Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Austeria (1981). It’s an instant of the kind of visual poetry...
Kinoteka
Kinoteka 2015: ‘Night Train’ review
★★★★☆ For his sixth feature, renowned Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz decided to board the Night Train (1959), inspired by his frequent trips to woo...
Kinoteka 2015: ‘Jump’ review
★★★☆☆ Surreality dons a cool sixties swagger in Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki’s intriguing and vaguely baffling Jump (1965). Abandoning the social realism with which...
Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ review
★★★★☆ There’s a conversation in Wojciech Jerzy Has’ hallucinatory picaresque epic, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), in which a character utters the following words, “if...
Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Hourglass Sanatorium’ review
★★★★★ Wojciech Jerzy Has took great relish in toying with narrative convention in the nestled labyrinthine pages of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). He dispenses...
Kinoteka 2015: ‘Knights of the Teutonic Order’ review
★★★★☆ “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever,” quoth Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. The turning...
Kinoteka 2015: ‘Blind Chance’ review
★★★★☆ Traditional narrative tropes of chance and fate are employed to glean some insight into living in Communist era Poland in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind...
Kinoteka 2015: ‘A Short Film About Killing’ review
★★★★★ “Since the days of Cain, no punishment has improved the world or deterred anyone from committing crimes.” A Short Film About Killing (1988)...
