Ewa Szykulska Movies
- 2005
Anna Jadowska's road movie It's Me, Now stars Agnieszka Warchulska as Hanka, a woman who impulsively decides while out running errands to climb aborad a school bus and go on an adventure where she meets a variety of interesting and colorful characters. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
- Starring:
- Agnieszka Warchulska, Maciej Marczewski, (more)
- 1985
Re-released in 1985 after being censored by the advent of martial law in 1981, this unrelentingly grim tale about a woman's life inside and outside a Polish prison weighs in on the side of heavy-duty misfortune. The police come for the pregnant Klara (Ewa Blaszczyk) on her wedding day, arrest her for embezzling funds, and throw her in prison. Then Klara's newborn daughter is taken away from her after her birth and sent to an orphanage. After more tragedies, Klara's sentence is commuted to 25 years instead of life, and within 12 years she is released on parole but walks out into a country plagued by political turmoil. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Ewa Blaszczyk, Grazyna Szapolowska, (more)
This is a sequel to the domestically popular Va Banque about the antagonism between Kramer (Leonard Peetraszak) a double-crossing, unscrupulous ex-thief, now in jail, and his former partner Kwintz (Jan Machulski, popular actor and father of director Juliusz Machulski). The setting is the 1930s. Kramer has been in prison thanks to Kwintz, and now with the help of an accomplice he escapes and seeks revenge against his nemesis. Kwintz gears up to defend himself by summoning his talented, crafty friends for help, and Kramer backs up the hitman he hires to kill Kwintz with a plan to send him to prison, just in case. Circumstances move rapidly along, and soon the escaped jailbird Kramer is about to take off for Switzerland with some stolen loot, bribing the Nazi border guards to look the other way as he leaves. At that point, everything goes unexpectedly haywire in a big way. This film should not be confused with the 1986 Va Banque by director Diethard Kosher.
~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Jan Machulski
- 1985
This fairly routine wartime spy drama was scripted by M.H. Gromar, who also wrote the original novel. Set at a pivotal point of World War II (1939 in Poland just before the Germans invade in the late summer), the story of spies and counterspies starts with Adam Iwinski (Henryk Talar) who has just been stripped of his officer's rank. A Polish military tribunal suspects Adam has been collaborating with an enemy agent, but the civilian government turns around and recruits him to go to Gdansk (aka: Danzig) to identify and capture or eliminate the elusive spy known as "Wotan." Wotan works for the German Secret Service but is not German by nationality. Adam sets forth and after a few misadventures realizes that Wotan has links to the very men who stripped him of his officer's rank. As his personal situation goes from dangerous to hopeless, the Germans begin their attack on the city. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Henryk Talar, Ewa Szykulska, (more)
- 1981
Twenty-Six Days in the Life of Dostoyevsky was entered on February 16th at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Dostoyevsky's death on February 9th, 1881, and won a "Best Actor" award for Anatoly Solonitsyn as Dostoyevsky. Solonitsyn was a favorite actor in Andrei Tarkovsky's films, and this was to be his penultimate role. This brief imaginary period in the famed Russian writer's life encapsulates one of his darker moments in 1866. At that time he was still a relatively unknown writer whose first widely acclaimed work, Crime and Punishment, was just on the horizon. His life was at a very low ebb as he struggled with debts he could not pay, and as he fought depression over the loss of his wife to tuberculosis, and the death of his brother, who was very close to him. His first literary journal had to be scrapped because of political reasons, and the second venture needed funding. The police come to see him, sent by his publisher who is demanding recompense for debts overdue. Desperate to escape the pressure on all sides, Dostoyevsky decides to undertake the impossible and write the story of The Gambler in 26 days, thereby satisfying the debt to the publisher at least. The secretary who takes down the dictation for the book slowly becomes enamored of Dostoyevsky, whose foibles and passions are revealed in the autobiographical tale she is transcribing. As "The Gambler" himself, Dostoyevsky traveled through Europe in 1862, deeply involved in two disparate loves: gambling and Polina Suslova Ewa Szykulska. Before long, the secretary becomes more and more entwined in Dostoyevsky's life as their relationship begins to blossom and the basis of a mutual love is formed. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Anatoli Solonitsin, Yevgeniya Simonova, (more)
Kwinto (Jan Machulski) is one irritated ex-con. He just got out of serving a six-year sentence for a crime he never commited and is going to get even - more than even - with the accomplice who set him up. It is Warsaw in the 1930s, and Kwinto is a gangster with ideals of loyalty that are sorely tried. A good friend in a jazz band has just been killed by the same man who sent Kwinto to prison, a man who is now a bank president. Nothing could be better, since Kwinto is a bank robber by profession. The ex-con teams up with a few of his cohorts to do one final bank heist - not knowing that his evil adversary has hired a hit man to do him in. The suspense and the mistakes build as the film twists and turns to the closing credits. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Jan Machulski, Leonard Pietraszak, (more)
- 1980
Director and writer Siegfried Kuehn) has created this farce based on the theme of a modern Don Juan, a director (Hilmar Thate) of operas behaving exactly like the protagonist of Mozart's "Don Giovanni," the opera he is currently directing. As the title of this film indicates, the director not only lives on Karl Liebkhnect street (Karl "love-slave" avenue), he also lives up to his address by maintaining a wife at home, a lover in the opera company, and a desire for "Don Giovanni's" lead female singer. Because of the director's love life, the production company starts to come apart at the seams as antagonisms rise, yet like the opera's denouement itself, the company gets its two acts together while the director has his own "tangled web" to somehow unravel, strand by reluctant strand. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Hilmar Thate, Beata Tyszkiewicz, (more)
- 1978
Ilya Averbakh was considered to have been one of the better directors of film romances in the former Soviet Union. This story of a writer's love spans many decades. An elderly writer (Yuri Bogatyryov) is visiting his wife (Ewa Szykulska) at a medical establishment to give her a copy of his latest book. As he travels, he remembers how they met during the chaos surrounding the Russian Civil War (1918-21). She came to the door of his apartment looking for a room and was carrying her infant son with her. He took her under his wing, but his job of conveying the meaning of the revolution frequently sent him on trips which placed him in danger. The two of them married, but around the beginning the Second World War, his wife left him following the accidental death of her then-teenaged son. On an assignment to the front, he meets an injured publisher who tells him about her life since she left him -- her affairs and so on -- before he dies of his wounds. After the war, he returns to his apartment, which the two of them shared together for so many years, and he finds her sitting there in a darkened room. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Yuri Bogatyrev, Ewa Szykulska, (more)
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