A Masterpiece!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

I watched the Wadja War Trilogy back to back, so you can imagine I was looking forward to the final instalment which is generally considered to be the best of the three. However, I was quite disappointed. The reason for my disappointment was because O felt the lead character was trying much too hard to be a Polish James Dean. The only difference being that the odd things James Dean used to do when he was acting, didn't seem weird out of place. Unfortunately, you don't get the same feel from the weird things that the lead in Ashes and Diamonds keeps doing throughout this movie. Even the final scene seems to me to be quite strange and almost comical.Having said that, the plot is great and Wajda does a great job capturing the atmosphere of confusion which must have existed in Poland on the last day of the war. Nationalists and communists were no longer fighting a common foe in the Nazis - rather they were now fighting each other for the right to rule Poland. Despite my reservations about the lead character, this is still worth watching. Given the other reviews I have read about this movie, I am clearly in a minority in my views about the lead character.

With WW2 ending, Poland finds itself in a period of transition and transformation. Millions have been uprooted, the country's infrastructure is in ruins, and there is uncertainty as to whether Russian Communists will move in to occupy the vacuum left by the departing Germans. Enter Maciek, a gunman who works for an anti-Communist faction. He's been tasked with assassinating Polish politicians sympathetic to the local communist party, which is what Andrzej Wajda's "Ashes and Diamonds" finds Maciek doing when it opens. His mission complete, Maciek then disappears to a neighbouring town, eager to learn his next assignment. What he learns, however, is something else: he's assassinated the wrong target. The rest of the film finds Maciek struggling to rationalise the killing of his fellow countrymen. The film's title encapsulates Poland's twin possibilities: destruction or prosperity. Maciek will not accept that the latter necessitates the former.The film plays like a pessimistic, very Eastern European take on "Cassablanca", most of the action taking place in bars, restaurants, shadows and over tables. This is a world rife with spies, communists, anti-communists, double-dealers, mercenaries, power vacuums, red herrings and characters who's loyalties constantly shift. Maciek's no Bogart, though. No cocksure American. He's a confused kid straight out of a 1970s Godard or Fassbinder movie, complete with big sunglasses and a part-time job as a terrorist. Hilariously, Maciek seems to never take off his sunglasses: his world is perpetually pitch black.The film's aesthetic, heavy with a type of symbolism typical of Wajda (upside down Christs, white horses which foreshadow Wajda's "Lotna" etc), tries to capture Maciek's own stormy, crisis of conscience. It's a noirish dark night of the soul. World War 2 has ended, Poland has survived, and yet why does she now find herself again at war? Why now are Poles killing Poles? How can Maciek justify killing his fellowmen? Today such moral dilemmas, as well as killing itself, has long been banalized down to nothingness. It's not that man no longer cares; man cares but does "it" anyway. The film ends with Maciek's own death, his blood stains forming the Polish flag, his body melting away into a field of garbage.Like many of Andrzej Wajda's films during this period, "Ashes and Diamonds" was a giant exercise in smuggling the artist's own political views past state censors. After WW2, Stalin created a communist, Soviet allied Polish state, officially dubbed "The People's Republic of Poland". As a part of the Eastern bloc, works of art in Poland deemed "oppositional" to both the Soviet Union and communism were firmly stamped out. And yet many of Wajda's films - though they tend to do this in a somewhat vague, elliptical way - are heavily critical of Polish politics and his local government's ties with the Soviet Union. Some authors have speculated that Poland's love for rebel archetypes and resistance fighters – local characters mythologised during WW2 - blinded censors to the "Ashes and Diamonds'" overall point: idiots, we're killing ourselves for Uncle Stalin!8.5/10 – "Ashes and Diamonds" is customarily thought of as being the second film in Wajda's "War Trilogy". The other films include "Kanal" (1957) and "A Generation" (1955). Worth two viewings.

I first discovered the enormity of the atrocities perpetrated by the Soviets in Poland through the non-fiction book The Captive Mind, by Polish author Czeslaw Milosz. One of the things that stuck with me was that the Polish resistance members who fought the Nazis were not seen as heroes by the Soviets, because those Poles were defending the old bourgeois order. So the old militaries and intelligentsia had to be killed to pave the way for a new state that upheld the values of the revolution.Andrzej Wajda captures this situation in Ashes and Diamonds, adapting a novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, coincidentally one of the intellectuals Milosz devotes a chapter to and who served the revolution with a lot of faith and ardour. Still, this is not a propaganda movie; Wadja somehow managed to trick the censors into not seeing criticism against the way the Soviet Union betrayed the people who believe in its ideals.Actor Zbigniew Cybulski plays Maciek Chelmicki, a killer working for the communists, who receives orders to kill Szczuka, a Communist leader. Although Maciek always found killing easy in the past, now he has to kill a former soldier and one of the many who believes in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, after falling in love with a barmaid, he realises that his life is a cycle of violence and that he wants to put an end to it. What follows is a night of self-discovery for the young killer.Although I wanted to like this movie more, a disjointed and often confusing narrative construction threw me off at several points. Cybulski is perfect as the killer, though, initially relaxed and thorough, then as the night progresses he becomes introspective and melancholic. I also loved the cinematography, especially the games between light and shadow. My favourite sequence was the murder of Szczuka. As he falls in Maciek's arms fireworks ignite in the sky celebrating the end of war; Maciek runs away leaving the body by a puddle, the fireworks reflecting in the water. His personal crisis and the celebration of an entire country come together and we know the future won't bode well for either.In free countries like Italy and France cinema revered communism. Movies like Novecento sound awfully dated nowadays. In countries where communism existed under no guises, their movies have remained timeless. This is not just a condemnation of one of the most oppressive totalitarian regimes that ever existed, but a depiction of human nature wherever ideals overthrow respect for life and dignity. Fifty-one years later, Ashes and Diamonds remains modern.

A masterpiece for all time. One of those films that one can not watch, which simply can not. Its like any genuine work of art can be seen at different levels: here - and the gunman, and the detective and love story, and the human drama, amounting to tragedy, and this is the existential drama and thinking about the national character, the fate of Poland - all for striking deeper level translation. It is unique in the film work of the operator, as built by frame, as planned, each episode. The game actors, so can we call this game??? Tsibulsky does not play, he just lives in this film! Some episodes ever sink into the mind: machine turn, opens the door to the church, a hapless, drop dead right at the altar ( "Lord Jesus" delivers one of the killers, in my opinion, Drevnovsky), a scene where she sings "Red poppies Monte -Cassini, but Machek and Anzhey Remembers his comrades, burning glasses with vodka, and Christine Machek, reciting poems on the tomb in the tumbledown church, killing Pikes when Helmitsky compresses old man killed in the arms and after shots Graham celebratory fireworks, white sheets, which is the blood Macheka, displaying the colors of the flag when it falls on the scrap-heap agonizing under the sounds of Oginski's polonez, which carries away its Cristina another man ... Sorry, that so much and confused, but on the other, I talk about this film can not, so much he means to me. If you still doubt - to watch or not - brush them: no see, not paying attention to the year of issue, so show your friends. Because it's a REAL MOVIE, but that is now in theaters, that spinning on the box that receives the Oscar - Household soap and odnodnevka (film that you'll forget right after watching it). But this - movies with a capital letter.