Piotr Fronczewski Movies
- 2003
Polish filmmaker Juliusz Machulski helms the relentless and merciless satirical comedy Superprodukcja. The film concerns a mobster desperate to turn his ditzy, flighty girlfriend into a box-office star. He reels in a perfectionist film critic to author the script, but feels resolutely unhappy with the treatment's artiistic pretensions, and thus forces the scenarist to rework the material as a buttered popcorn picture.
~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rafal Krolikowski, Piotr Fronczewski, (more)
- 2001
A man struggles to come to terms with a mystery that has haunted him throughout his adult life in this drama from Poland. In 1967, a 13-year-old boy named Dawid discovered a cache of explosives and began experimenting with them; one day, several of his friends saw Dawid wave to them shortly before a massive explosion went off near a railway tunnel, and no one ever saw the young man again. Thirty years later, one of Dawid's close friends, Pawel (Marek Kondrat), returns to Poland for the first time in 11 years to visit Juliane (Juliane Kohler), a woman he used to love. As Pawel returns home, he discovers his thoughts keeps drifting back to Dawid and what might have happened to him that day. Pawel keeps replaying the explosive incident in his mind, and goes so far as to track down Elka (Krystyna Janda), Dawid's girlfriend, who was with him moments before the explosion, though then as now she refuses to talk about what happened. Pawel is unable to determine for sure just what happened or how Dawid died -- or if he did in fact die at all. Weiser was nominated for the Golden Bear award at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marek Kondrat, Krystyna Janda, (more)
- 1999
In this dark comedy-drama, communism has fallen in Poland after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the building that was once home to the Communist Party's Central Committee has now been taken over by that most capitalistic of enterprises, an advertising agency. A well-known Russian model under contract to the agency has gone missing, and Kuba, the firm's casting director, is told to find her as soon as possible. While the model never turns up, he does discover a beautiful young woman with whom he quickly becomes infatuated. But before Kuba can launch her into stardom in the advertising world, a series of bizarre and improbable circumstances throw his life into a tailspin. The first feature film from director Lukasz Zadrzynski, Billboard had its American premier at the 1999 Nantucket Film Festival.
~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Andrzej Seweryn
- 1993
In this lightweight Polish comedy a troupe of Polish actors in modern Germany tries to put on a show. Maks, a director from Wroclaw has come to Berlin to assist his friends as they endeavor to finally produce a formerly banned review. He is shocked to find his actors friends impoverished. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Piotr Fronczewski, Ewa Blaszczyk, (more)
- 1990
The censor in this film is accustomed to watching characters of the films he sees speak only the lines he has permitted them to speak. He generally knows within a word exactly what he will hear. It's a boring job, but he appreciates the cat-and-mouse game of trying to suppress anything forbidden in the face of steady efforts to sneak something past him. However, it has all become old hat to him. One day at the Liberty Cinema, a commercial movie theater near his offices, the characters on the movie screen start speaking out of character and refuse to speak the lines written for them. This provokes a furor, and he is called in to attempt to deal with the situation -- to no avail. Eventually he relates the obduracy of the characters to that of those in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, but his efforts to control the situation with that understanding backfire when characters from one film start showing up in the other one. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Janusz Gajos, Zbigniew Zamachowski, (more)
- 1989
For con men, the game of trickery is at least as important as any monetary reward they might seek. In this wry Polish film, a con-man (Piotr Fronczewski) has just been released from prison. A real artist of conmanship, he starts back at his old tricks slowly, but his deceptions grow ever more elaborate and travel steadily up the ladder of society until he has local politicians and important government ministers involved in his schemes. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Piotr Fronczewski, Maria Pakulnis, (more)
- 1985
Zbigniew Zapassiewiewicz stars in The Baritone (Baryton) The world-renowned title character magnanimously promises to honor his home town with a concert. He arrives with his entourage, including his faithless wife and backstabbing manager. As he prepares to perform, all those around him formulate their own plans to exploit their host's fame and fortune. And then, as the appointed hour approaches, the Baritone loses his voice. It's amazing how quickly leeches scurry away when their blood source dries up. Set in the early 1930s, The Baritone has as much to say about the manners and mores of Polish life of that era as it does about its fictional protagonist. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Piotr Fronczewski, (more)
- 1984
This family-oriented Polish comedy was adapted from a bestselling series of Polish books by Kornel Makuszynski; it concerns the wacky adventures of a fair-haired 15-year-old girl named Ewa (Dorota Grzelak), whose self-appointed mission in life consists of attempting to right all of the wrongs she encounters. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dorota Grzelak, Piotr Fronczewski, (more)
- 1981
Hanka Ordonowna (Dorota Sialinska) was a famous cabaret singer in Poland in the 1930s, and this film is a dramatized rendering of her adult life. Her husband was an officer in the Polish army, serving in the North African campaigns with the Allied troops. Hanka herself was handling a career that went from being a chorus girl to singing to appearing in movies. Her rise from poverty to stardom was not without its own amount of suffering, as she fought consumption at one point, and the occupying Nazis at another. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dorota Stalinska, Stanislawa Celinska, (more)
- 1981
Director Janusz Kijowski's Voices is an introspective journey into the nature of the mind as seen from the perspectives of a spiritual approach in opposition to a scientific approach. When a woman who teaches organic chemistry in high school begins to hear voices and receive "impulses" from space, she is examined by a psychiatric team that pronounces her normal -- they can find no personality disorders. A scientist is not quite convinced of their findings and decides to run some bioelectric tests on her. He comes away thinking that the psychologists were right -- she is normal, but there may, indeed, be external voices that she is perceiving. As the mystery of the voices begins to heat up, the scientists and others become more and more involved in solving the issue, and delving into the nature of communication and the mind. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ewa Dalkowska, Krzysztof Zaleski, (more)
- 1980
This is psychological drama by Tomasz Zygadlo begins as a straightforward story. Jan (Roman Wilhelmi) is the host of a nightly talk show in which he counsels people who call in with their problems. He is dedicated to helping these lonely souls but becomes increasingly disturbed when his co-workers and supervisors at the radio station do not appreciate his program; they seem unable to grasp the importance of what he is doing. Aside from that, Jan's private life is frayed around the edges. His wife is a heavy drinker and his mistress has no comprehension about who he is or what he is doing. Jan's frustration over this lack of recognition builds to an explosive level, threatening to upset the balance of his daily life. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Roman Wilhelmi, Anna Seniuk, (more)
- 1979
No, this film was not made in Hong Kong, nor does it star David Carradine. This Kung-Fu comes from, of all places, Poland. The film's protagonist is in his own way as destructive as Bruce Lee; the trouble is, he succeeds only in destroying himself. A well-liked engineer in a huge company, our hero makes the fatal mistake of asking questions the company's bonus system. As a result of the subsequent brouhaha, he loses both his job and wife. An old pal, who happens to be a journalist, tries to come to the rescue, but the engineer's stubborness proves to be his downfall. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Teresa Sawicka, Piotr Fronczewski, (more)
"Project Enigma" was designed to crack the Nazi secret code machine during World War II. Historically, the success of this mission has been attributed to the British. Enigma Secret reveals Poland's role in this crucial turn of events. Three Polish math whizzes pool their skills to break the code, and, incidentally, to stay alive long enough to complete their task. Tadeusz Borowski, Piotr Fronczewski and Piotr Garlicki star in this intelligently constructed, fact-based war story. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1978
Room with a Sea View is a Polish film predicated on an old Hollywood chestnut. Marek Bargielowski plays a Nietzschean college graduate who rents a hotel room facing the sea, then steps out onto the window ledge, preparing to jump. Bargielowski's one-time professor Piotr Fronczewski shows up to try to talk his former student out of committing suicide. The rest of the film is a "humanism vs. intellect" argument, with humanism winning out. The original title of Room with a Sea View was Pokój z Widokiem na Morze. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marek Bargielowski, Piotr Fronczewski, (more)
- 1975
Krzysztof Zanussi's 1974 feature Bilans Kwartalny (aka The Quarterly Balance) represented the filmmaker's first attempt to return to highbrow, intellectual fare in his native Poland, following his disastrous studio experience making the genre heist picture The Catamount Killing. This quiet, low-key character study observes a period in the life of Marta Sieminska (Maja Komorowska), a resolute but utterly unsatisfied 40-year-old Polish housewife who attempts to find self-fulfillment in an extramarital affair with a stranger but encounters only despair, suffering, and pain as her innocence is brutally ripped away. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Maja Komorowska, Piotr Fronczewski, (more)
