Kinoblog

Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń has just had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, with Leslie Felperin’s Variety review broadly in line with what seems to be the critical consensus:

The 1940 massacre by the Soviets of some 15,000 Polish Army officers at Katyn, Russia, reps the hub from which spokes of drama emanate in the WWII epic “Katyn.” First work in five years by Andrzej Wajda, Polish cinema’s leading eminence grise, doesn’t feel like the personal project one might expect from the son of one slain at Katyn. Instead, this plays almost like an academic master class, meticulously exploring the event’s ramifications but only catching full fire at the end. Foreign-language film Oscar nominee did boffo biz domestically last year, and should make a victory lap around arthouses offshore.

Other substantial English-language pieces include one in The Economist, and especially Anne Applebaum’s magnum opus, ‘A Movie That Matters‘ in the New York Review of Books.

The film will be opening theatrically in Britain in April, but it’s out on DVD in Poland next week. I’m getting conflicting reports as to whether it has English subtitles, but I’ve ordered a copy anyway, as I have enough Polish friends to palm it off onto if I’m unlucky. There are two versions, a single-disc edition with just the film, and a double-disc one crammed with extras, but long experience with Polish DVDs suggests that they probably won’t have English subtitles, regardless of whether they’re on the main feature.