Don’t have time to read my blathering about something I’m underqualified to discuss? That’s fine! But please skip to the end and watch one of the most awesome things you have ever seen. The problem with paying tribute to the films of my birth year is my birth year: 1981 was one of the low […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/16 & 10/18World premiere: 5 August, 2011, Poland When it works, and it does so more often than not, Rafael Lewandowski’s The Mole is a well-considered, quietly ambivalent film about the scars of living in a democratic country where totalitarianism happened recently enough that not-so-old people can still remember the […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/15World premiere: 11 March, 2011, Poland 2011 is really much too late for anybody to still be amazed that there are cartoons – not “animated features”, which sounds like something stately and artistically ambitious by Miyazaki, but crude, brightly colored cartoons – made expressly for an adult audience; even so, […]

In the spring of 1940, when Poland was ground zero in the tug-of-war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to gain complete control of Eastern Europe, a group of some 12,000 Polish prisoners-of-war were executed and buried in mass graves in the Katyń Forest in Smolensk Oblast. The graves were discovered by the Nazis […]

The second of two reviews. The first can be found here. In 1988, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz released Dekalog, a ten-episode TV miniseries explicating each of the Ten Commandments, that is acclaimed from virtually every corner as one of the essential masterpieces of world cinema. In the same year, the […]

The first of two reviews. The second can be found here. In 1988, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz released Dekalog, a ten-episode TV miniseries explicating each of the Ten Commandments, that is acclaimed from virtually every corner as one of the essential masterpieces of world cinema. In the same year, the […]