Search Results for: label/Kinoteka

★★★★★ It has been sixty years since the release of Andrzej Wajda’s first film, Generation (1955), and in that time he has directed over fifty […]

★★★★☆ Novelist turned filmmaker Tadeusz Konwicki excelled at crafting an atmosphere of the otherworldly on the screen. Though 1965’s Jump may be more widely known […]

★★★★☆ 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 that […]

★★★★★ In 1956 there was a seismic political shift in Poland known variously as the Polish Thaw or Polish October. The Stalinist period ended and […]

★★★★☆ For his sixth feature, renowned Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz decided to board the Night Train (1959), inspired by his frequent trips to woo actress […]

★★★☆☆ Surreality dons a cool sixties swagger in Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki’s intriguing and vaguely baffling Jump (1965). Abandoning the social realism with which many […]

★★★★☆ There’s a conversation in Wojciech Jerzy Has’ hallucinatory picaresque epic, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), in which a character utters the following words, “if I […]

★★★★★ Wojciech Jerzy Has took great relish in toying with narrative convention in the nestled labyrinthine pages of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). He dispenses with […]

★★★★☆ “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever,” quoth Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. The turning wheel […]

★★★★☆ Traditional narrative tropes of chance and fate are employed to glean some insight into living in Communist era Poland in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance […]

★★★★★ “Since the days of Cain, no punishment has improved the world or deterred anyone from committing crimes.” A Short Film About Killing (1988) – […]

★★★★☆ With the fires of the Second World War still smouldering European cinema rose from the embers across the continent. At one time such resurgence […]

★★★★★ The post-war years begat a period of enormous creativity across European cinema and Krzysztof Zanussi’s Illumination (1973) stands out as a prime example of […]

★★☆☆☆ Krzysztof Zanussi position as Poland’s moral cinematic conscience is presumably the one he was playing up to for his latest film, Foreign Body (2014). […]

★★★★☆ If all of life is a beautiful equation, then madness is re-running it over and over with the expectation of a different outcome. This […]

★★★★☆ Krzysztof Zanussi is a filmmaker that has, for much of his career, been considered by many as the cinematic conscience of Poland. There is […]