Tag: Poland

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies Top Ten

Top Ten Movies
(and more)
2021

Work in progress – subject to change. Because I am still watching movies released in 2021, so it’s always possible that a new title could usurp the number one in due course. Before that, I have a lot more movies still to add.

All films received either a theatrical or an online release in the UK between 01/01/21 and 31/12/21. Prior to 2020, I’d never included online releases (well, maybe the odd one or two as a special case) but that year saw the film distribution business turned upside down by COVID-19. How 2022 and beyond will look is anyone’s guess.

This version excludes re-releases (Psycho, Paris, Texas and Pickpocket, not to mention the first six Bond movies, would top everything here). A link to that longer list will be added here in due course.

In addition to re-releases, this version also excludes films seen in festivals which haven’t had any other UK release in 2021. A link to that even longer list will be added here in due course.

Finally, last year’s list is here.

Top Ten (UK theatrical + online movie releases 2021)

Please click on titles to see reviews. (Some links yet to be added.)

1. Getting Away With Murder(s) (UK)

2.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Getting Away
With Murder(s)

State-sanctioned killing

Getting Away With Murder(s)
Directed by David Nicholas Wilkinson
Certificate 15, 175 minutes
Released 1 October

The industrial extermination of the Holocaust included most infamously some six million Jews but also smaller numbers of other groups including Poles, gay men, the disabled and political dissidents, some 11 million people in all. It remains a stark reminder of the evil of which human beings at their worst are capable.

Getting Away With Murder(s) is a consistently compelling documentary which approaches this atrocity from an angle we’ve not really seen before: why were 99% of the perpetrators never held to account for their crimes?

The filmmaker David Wilkinson takes his camera to the sites of specific events, from the Auschwitz death camps… [read more]

Full review published in October 2021 issue of Reform.

See also my alternative review on this site.

Trailer:

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Features Live Action Movies

Sweat

Director – Magnus von Horn – 2020 – Poland, Sweden – Cert. 15 – 106m

****

An Instagram fitness celebrity struggles with the tension between constant self-promotion and everyday existence – on MUBI from Friday, September 17th

This opens with Sylwia Zajac (Magdalena Kolesnik) leading a demanding workout with a crowd of dozens of her fitness fans in a shopping mall. It closes during her appearance on the ‘Good Morning TVN’ TV chat show with her doing a wake up workout for the camera. Somewhere in the middle, when she visits her mum Basia (Aleksandra Konieczna) for a birthday gathering where she meets Basia’s new boyfriend Fryderyk (Zbigniew Zamachowski), she plays her latest fitness DVD on the big plasma TV she’s just given her mum – who thinks it’s too big for her living room.

Hitchcock once described movies as “life with the dull bits left out” but this Polish movie takes a completely opposite approach, with writer-director Van Horne interested in the dull bits in between the star’s high profile presence. Sylwia is as much an Instagram personality as a fitness trainer and has “around 600 000” followers on the platform.

During the opening workout, she addresses her fans as “my loves”, the mode of address she consistently uses in her posts and, it turns out, in life, and after the workout she publicly takes a selfie.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Giraffe

Director – Anna Sofie Hartmann – 2019 – Germany, Denmark – 82m

****

On MUBI from Thursday, August 6th. As part of a series of films from the 2019 Locarno Film Festival.

There is a beautiful, lengthy shot of a giraffe at the start. Beyond that, it’s hard to know why it’s called that. No doubt we’re meant to construct our own ideas as to why this might be so.

Leaving that aside, this is a curious film, part drama, part documentary. Some of the time, you’re not exactly sure which of the two you’re watching.

A link is being built between Denmark and Holland that will require the demolition of numerous 19th Century farmhouses in its path. It falls to ethnologist Dana, 38 (Lisa Loven Kongsli) to compile a record of these houses and the people who lived in them before they are gone forever. The premises vary from derelict to maintained with occupants about to move out.

Going through one of the derelict farmhouses, Dana discovers the diary of one if its occupants and starts reading. The woman lived alone but had occasional romantic visitors, a compelling tale – for Dana at least, since it seems uncannily to mirror her own existence.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Kill It And Leave This Town

Director – Mariusz Wilczynski– 2020 – Poland – 88m

****1/2

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

From its opening of a man smoking in the dark to its closing image of giants tied down on a beach like felled Gullivers in Lilliput, this is awash with the sort of gloomy imagery readily associated with East European art pictures. That’s not to say it isn’t highly effective though. Set partly in a grey, heavily industrialised town where chimneys constantly belch out smoke and partly in a seaside resort, it has a narrative through line but constantly weaves around that with a series of episodes, dreams and memories. Nevertheless it possesses its own, coherent inner logic.

An old woman (Krystyna Janda) wishes her husband (Andrzej Chyra) goodbye as he takes their son Janek (Maja Ostaszewska) out. Later she visits the shops where, although she makes a point of explaining that she has the correct change, no one seems to be interested in actually serving her. Indeed, these are strange shops. Sometimes the fishmonger’s assistant (Malgorzata Kozuchowska) guts fish and sometimes she guts little humans who are around the same size.

At one point a man (Daniel Olbrychski) whose hat conceals that he has the head of a cat delivers an unsettling line about his purposes in the world to do with power, evil and good.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hurricane

Director – David Blair – 2018 – Poland, UK – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

In cinemas from Friday 7th September

Review originally published in DMovies.org

It’s too easy to take most British WW2 movies (e.g. Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan, 2017) and claim they bolster the idea of Brexit – Britain alone against the world, defeating the dastardly Germans and so on. Hurricane is different. Its Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots are refugees from the Polish Air Force, wiped out by the Luftwaffe in a mere three days and kept on ice by Britain’s xenophobic War Office following their arrival in England.

When they’re finally allowed into the air, these Poles turn out to be much better fighter pilots than the majority of Brits who are being slaughtered by the enemy at an alarming rate. Indeed, it’s the Polish pilots that turn the Battle of Britain around.

Hurricane is named after the RAF’s most widely used fighter aircraft…

Full review at DMovies.org.

Trailer: