As Andy Warhol may have said if he had been a little more specific with his pop -cultural prophecies: “In the future, all famous character actors will be John Wick for 15 minutes.”
Lesley Manville only gets about 10 in kasia adamiks War saw-Set “The Winter of the crow“And the action splits much closer to the things of Jason Bourne than to Pistolfu from Baba Yaga. But the sight of” Phantom Thread “star who fights a Thuggish member of Poland’s military advice for national salvation with a wire clothes is hardly the only highlight of this frequent and abundant and abundant political”
The dead Communist Do not live to regret underestimation of Manville’s nature, but others come – albeit less for her ability than for her will to strike back. A British psychiatry professor that has risen to the top of a field dominated by men (and maintains an understandable chip on the shoulder about how difficult it was for her to get there), Dr. Joan Andrews may not seem to be much of a threat. But she is as a tough customer as they come; Frostier than a Polish winter, and equally indifferent to the cooling effect she has on someone within easy reach.
The beginning of film See that Joan is traveling to the gloomy and bleach capital to give a lecture of careers about schizophrenia at a local university, and she is no one too satisfied when a group of student activists immediately disturbs her speech with a Blitz toilet paper and sloganing. “How can a sick society provide mental care?” One of them asks for supporting the professor from the podium. Despite the nature of her life’s work, Joan could not possibly care about that issue. If she is incapable of ever maintaining a relationship for more than six months, she is more interested in studying suffering than sympathizing with humans – let alone the political causes that can ok them together.
When the shit hits the fan on his first night in town (telephone lines cut, thoughts on the streets, the police who take hold of dissidents from their homes with impunity), Joan’s only thought is to be fucked out of Dodge and witness to an excellent murder makes her want to escape from the country so much faster. Of course, it proves easier than done (especially when the jam realizes that she has photographic evidence of their crime), and the crazy way home will force her to realize that her research is only of value to a world that is enough healthy to want it.
Mercifully, “The Winter of the White Crow” is much more dreamlike than didactic, with Adamik who prefers to emphasize the hallucinating beginning of totalitarianism over “Save the cat!”-which steps for a passive character that turns into a more active. (The Military Council for National Salvation was abbreviated to Wron in Polish, which lent it to Puns based on “Wrona”, the language’s words for Crow.) Adapted from a novelle by Nobel Prize Writer Olga Tokarczuk, and Managing produced by “Green Border” Agnieszka to the TAGNIES. Green-Greate thing from Real Greenical. Horror), “The Winter of the Crow” immediately arrests for its atmosphere of visceral fate. While everyone else has adapted their eyes to the darkness of life in the eastern blocks, Joan experiences the gray scale that is Drudgi in the Soviet era Warsaw for the first time, an opportunity that this film exploits to see the city as a half-height concrete labyrinth whose design reflects Kafkaesque nature of its political concerns.
At a time when most budget -conscious period pieces are undone by the gloss in modern digital format, “Winter of the Crow” feels like nothing less than a small miracle of evocation. Tomasz Naumiuk’s soup -thick cinematography is sufficiently structured to see the sterile air in the film’s brutalist interiors and to get lost in the hopeless void on the Warsaw streets at night. Aleksandra Kierzkowska’s production design is in the same way lifeless and lived in at once, as the city’s barren tower blocks seem painted on the horizon but also real enough to touch-like so much of this movie, they blur on the line between reality and something even worse, just sharpening in focus when Joan starts to recognize the rules and the stresses.
The brilliantly structured atmosphere gives an upcoming feeling of horror to history, and the basic nightmare of Joan’s tendency adopts enough urgent to make you shake with the used concern for someone who has stuck in a place they do not understand. Frigid as she can be, but Joan finds that she is not as lonely as she thinks. Her young contact, Alina (Zofia Wichłacz), a student deeply embedded in the pro-democratic solidarity movement, may not be too concerned about Joan’s comfort given the crisis. Still, she does what she can to arrange the self -absorbed professor’s safe passage home. As a direct result of that hospitality, women’s respective causes will soon become more adapted than either Joan or Alina would have wanted, and all the injuries visited to one of them eventually threaten to be judged as well.
“Winter of the Crew” is litter with temporary moments of violence (including a short car chase that compensates for its lack of crashes with a variety of hyperin -rolling camera angles), but this is not in any way an action movie, and it is proof of the fun of watching Manville Chip and Tina that it remains as exciting as the reintroduction. Sandra Buchta script manages to stay on the right side of probability even when the situation escalates. While the film’s plot is filled with all kinds of Thriller Mishegoss that was not found in the original story (including a less influencing moral victory of “they have thoughts, we have each other” variety), a late como from Tom Burke when the British ambassador adds a much appreciated tension to a slack third act.
Best of all, Burkes a scene dramatizes an important aspect of Joan’s character development (especially her growing awareness of how to beat Wron on her own game) and does it in a way that gives the feeling of telling this story from a fish-ur water perspective. There is always the risk of cheap a historical film by focusing it on a fictitious outsider (usually any white who speaks English as a first language), but “Winter of the Crow” is building to its climate by centering the moral obligation that outsiders must use their relative security as a shield for the suppressed. Joan may not look much like a hero, and she really doesn’t act like a lot of time either, but she gets the job done when it counts.
Rating: B.
“Winter of the Crow” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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