“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held prisoner.
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an inanimate clay figure, brought to life when a magic word is placed inside its mouth. Piotr Szulkin’s dark 1979 film debut makes reference both to this legend and to Gustav Meyrink’s unsettling 1914 novel, moving the action forward from the latter’s fin-de-siècle Prague to a geographically non-specific dystopian future.
Jesse Eisenberg's first film as writer/director was 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, which met with modest acclaim. But he’s taken a giant leap forward with the follow-up, A Real Pain, which has been hoovering up critical plaudits from festival showings and its American release.
Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (Faraon) is a state-funded superprodukcja, a 152-minute Polish epic, set, incongruously, in Ancient Egypt. First released in 1966, it wasn’t intended to be an Eastern Bloc copy of Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra; Pharaoh is an altogether darker, more sober work.
In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected upon the special kind of paranoia that attends the ill individual. Each person is, by virtue of "being a little world", supremely conscious of a change in the atmosphere.
Conclave
Director Edward Berger won an Oscar for his last feature, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), but here he concerns himself with the more intimate and claustrophobic battlefield of the Vatican. The Pope (Bruno Novelli) has died, and under the watchful eye of the Dean, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the cardinals gather to appoint his successor. No-one said it would be easy.
We’re used to dabs of colour splashing briefly across black-and-white movies – Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Coppola’s Rumble Fish spring to mind – but director Agnieszka Holland has a new and uncompromising variant on the ruse.
Chances are few enough to catch Polish composer Szymanowski’s densely brilliant 1920s score for a ballet about love in the Tatra mountains. Harnasie (Robbers) is so little known that we need a clear line through action and sung text. That all went out of the window in the projections of renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor and visual artist Ben Cullen Williams.
There’s a touch of Dr Zhivago about director Paweł Pawlikowski’s screenplay for his 2018 film Cold War. Its plot is driven by the same Lara/Yuri dynamic, of an overwhelming love affair trying to outflank the forces of history. Now it's been adapted at the Almeida as a play-with-music by Conor McPherson, with lush songs by Elvis Costello, directed by Rupert Goold. It’s not remotely Christmassy, though offers a gift of no ordinary kind.