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While director Łukasz Jaworski gets spirited performances across the board in the sixth instalment of the hit Polish franchise, it leans heavily on familiarity with the characters

‘When the pressure builds, you don’t notice it. But once that valve blows, it’s chaos. And during the holidays, people’s valves tend to blow.” It’s fortunate that plumber Lucek (Janusz Chabior), repairing a burst pipe so warring couple Szczepan (Piotr Adamczyk) and Karina (Agnieszka Dygant) can salvage their Christmas dinner, specialises in simultaneous waterworks and relationship advice. That yule season is the same fraught affair everywhere is the message served up in glossy globalised style by this hit Polish franchise, now on its sixth instalment after kicking off in 2011 inspired by Love, Actually.

Lucek, though, is hardly a good guy; he’s actually angling to fleece Józek (Hiroaki Murakami), a wide-eyed Japanese visitor to Warsaw out to reconnect with his Polish ancestry.

Stars: Marta Krol, Marcin Sztabinski, Marieta Zukowska, Janusz Chabior, Olaf Marchwicki | Written and Directed by Piotr Ryczko

Horror has always been impressive at how it handles mental health in its movies and shows. Most recently movies like The Babadook and Hereditary have shown how peoples mental health has deteriorated after a trauma in their life. And I believe in both movies, and several others in the genre, this is handled extremely well. I Am Ren might not explain or show any trauma immediately but it does go down a similar route to these films, albeit in a more sci-fi orientated way.

The main science fiction element of the film comes from the lead characters belief that she is an android. As expected this isn’t simple. No-one around her seems to agree with her, including her husband and her son. Is he the victim in an abusive relationship, are situations...

In Tadeusz Krol's latest psychological thriller The Last Floor (Ostatnie Pietro) one man's paranoia becomes ridiculously overwhelming when he accidentally discovers that the military unit he's been serving in for his entire life is entangled in a mysterious criminal affair. At almost exactly the same time, his wife's ex-lover shows up in the seemingly peaceful town. To make a horrible situation even worse, his son gets beaten up in school for the traditional, albeit very radical and discriminatory values to which his father strongly adheres.The man, an experienced Polish army captain Derczynski (Janusz Chabior), begins to lose his mind in a situation that requires nothing more than calmness and perceptiveness. It's a rather slow and cumulative process, but a relatively violent and horrifying one. He...

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As stated in the description of the new book ‘Polish Cinema Now!’, published to coincide with the 9th annual edition of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, Polish cinema of the past twenty years, made without state control of production after the fall of communism, is paradoxically much less well known than their cinema of the earlier post war era. This year’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, which runs between 24 March and 23 April at various London venues as well as venues in Belfast, Edinburgh, Exeter and Glasgow, seeks to rectify this lack of exposure by presenting an eclectic selection of the best of contemporary Polish cinema, while also showcasing obscure cult and archival films from the past.

The festival kicks off on the 24th with Jerzy Skolimowski’s excellent Essential Killing, the writer/director’s second feature in three years after a 17 year absence from cinemas. Along with Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski,...