A major box-office success in its native Poland, epic war drama Warsaw 44 (Miasto 44) dramatises the doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Polish resistance attempted to liberate the city from Nazi occupation, hoping for support from the advancing Soviet Red Army that never came. The movie sets up a romantic triangle between three teenage volunteers in the struggle (a callow youth and the two young women who love him) yet doesn’t flinch in its brutal depiction of the realities of combat. A couple of slow-motion action scenes feel misjudged, but the film does convince when it shows two of the characters (played by Jéosef Pawlowski and Zofia Wichlacz) almost paralysed by shell shock as the city’s tragedy unfolds around them.
Certificate 15. Runtime 122 mins. Director
Warsaw 44 debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere at 10.35pm today and is available on Amazon Prime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMPlYYpT_I
