Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

paloma54 If you have read some of the other reviews, you already have a fair idea of what this is about. Considering the miserable legacy left behind, Marxism is not something that I can consider a positive development. And the growing self-righteousness of the anti-Nazi Marxists is typical of an increasing number of Americans who seem to think that we need to try the Marxist ideas yet again.The acting in this film is really pretty terrible. All the time I was watching A Generation, I kept thinking I was watching a movie from the 1920s. The story line is flimsy, there is almost no character development, and frankly, I felt as if this was a piece of Soviet propaganda. I'll watch two more Wajda movies, but I'm hoping they will be a marked improvement.

Lee Eisenberg The movie that made Andrzej Wajda famous depicts a group of people in Poland's resistance during WWII. In one scene, the movie's protagonist Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki) learns about Marxism from another man. It's clear that this speech is directed not only at the Nazi occupation, but also at the Soviet occupation. A scene towards the end of "Pokolenie" ("A Generation" in English) reminded me of Agnieszka Holland's "In Darkness", which was recently a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.As for what I thought of Andrzej Wajda's feature debut. I earlier saw Wajda's "Popiół i diament" ("Ashes and Diamonds" in English). From what I understand about the themes that Wajda depicted in that one, it sounded like what we might call the perfect Polish movie. "A Generation" is also really good, although I did find "Ashes and Diamonds" to be a little better. In an interview, Wajda noted that the title refers to his generation: the leaders of Poland's pre-war film industry had fled the country, and so his generation was essentially starting it from scratch.All in all, a very good movie. Watch for a young Roman Polanski as one of Stach's compatriots.

writers_reign Westerners like myself have at least two strikes on them when faced in 2010 with a film shot more or less half a century earlier under a regime which we in the West have never experienced. It begins very much in the vein of the Italian neo-realism school that began a decade earlier so that the first impressions are that Polish cinema was stuck in a stylistic rut but gradually it sheds that look and emerges as a movie in its own right. It is, of course, depicting events less than a decade old so presumably is authentic in that respect. For all I know there WERE groups of young Poles who became active in the Resistance at exactly the same time very much as the group here. For me it was difficult to become involved with the characters possibly because they were all and - with the exception of Roman Polanski who fails to distinguish himself here - and remain unknown to me, unlike say, the cast of L'Armee des Ombres. Nevertheless I will persevere with the other two - Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds - of the trilogy.

allyjack Hard not to view this film with the benefit of hindsight when - for example - the final image, of faces almost tangibly seeing the light of a new tomorrow, is apparently so straightforwardly propagandistic; scenes such as that in which the older workman talks reverently about the promise of Karl Marx now seem at best quaint. That's probably not an entirely fair prism through which to consider the film, but the theme of anti-Nazi resistance obviously becomes less stirring when one considers the limitations of what's being put forward as the alternative. Furthermore, although the movie's gritty, shadowy pace generally makes for entertaining viewing, there's a fairly consistent series of images which seem to push too hard - the heart-shaped photo slot at the fair through which we watch as she steps away from him; the Hitchcock-like fall through the well of the spiral staircase. The movie's pace and concentrated immersion in its time and place makes it engrossing, and the earnestness and deprivation are still touching, but it's surely no longer the viewing experience it once was.