Movie reviews

POKOLENIE IKEA (THE IKEA GENERATION)

Recommended. Dedicated to late David J. Prescott - a Polish comic book and short story author who felt more Irish than Polish, with Polish evergreen singer Majka Jeżowska acting an episode. Director/producer Dawid Gral took care to provide wonderfully surrounding sound which puts you right inside the cafes, restaurants, clubs. Michalina Olszańska is superb as Olga. The movie is a bit disturbing but accurate depiction of modern professionals in their 30s and younger where sex dominates private life yet from time to time something deeper than physicality emerges. The movie is professionally produced in terms of sound and visuals and engaging as you follow a serial playboy in his conquests. His legal career also shines plenty of light on the financial exploitation of clients and the easiness of lawyers' work. It's a generation of easy-com-easy-go.

VLASTNICI (OWNERS)

Watchable. This budget Czech tragicomedy is a dissection of common property management. Each character is distinct, the problems life-like so it's hard to laugh. The ending is tongue-in-cheek and quite open. Early end credits show each person or couple in their place. Then it's truly over.

WYSNIONA HISTORIA KINA NA PODLASIU (DREAMLIKE HISTORY OF CINEMA IN PODLASIE) 

The exhibition which has was held by Kinoteka in Warsaw was available to all cinema ticket holders at no extra charge till 16th March. The photographs and the stories below them (the QR codes next to the Polish descriptions directed you to the English version) told about surprising links of Podlasie (a region in eastern Poland) to Hollywood. The exhibition also bridged pre-war and contemporary cinema since the stills, however aged they looked, showed modern-era Polish actors, all with Podlasie roots, impersonating the ones whose stories you read. That was partly because of the scarcity of pre-war pictures, partly to demonstrate the continuum of Podlasie cinema.

The exhibition accompanied an album with the same stills and stories in print form. Sadly, while elderly people would have been most interested, the small print with a hard to read serif font, even in the original Polish version, rendered the descriptions hard to get through and the English ones, in pale grey, barely legible at all. Big blank spaces on the text pages meant poor space organization. Though, I have to admit, my mum, who uses a magnifying glass, loved the album.

LES AMANDIERS (FOREVER YOUNG)

Watchable. Directed by actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, it tells a story of young students of acting in which it resembles "Fame" but Frenchified, with emphasis on drugs and homosexuality while AIDS is straight people's problem. The title refers to the acting profession meaning to immortilise them. Beautiful and talented Nadia Tereszkiewicz appears as Stella but there are top performances all around. The time of the events is revealed only towards the end. Fine but derivative and with no clear point.  

Reviewed from the distributor's screener, cinematic reception might differ.