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Usually, thrillers have either one-note characters or extremely complex ones. The new Netflix film Freestyle is a fast-paced thriller that introduces you to the character of Diego. Diego is a bit of both. He is a complex character that is at once dealing with his career as a rapper, his absurd love life, and his friend Flour’s transgressions that get him into trouble. He is also one-note, as he shows the same energy and enthusiasm when he’s getting beaten up as he does when he’s excited to meet his lover. There are other characters in the film that make life hell for Diego. One of them is also his father, who is a gangster himself. The performance by Maciej Musialowski as Diego is decent, but he doesn’t get to explore his character deeply as he is constantly slammed by someone or another. Let’s take a...

It used to be ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll,’ but the new film Freestyle has us clamoring for ‘sex, drugs, and hip-hop.’ Hip-hop, or rap, is a kind of music and singing style made popular by artists in America and is the spirit animal of this film’s narrative choices. Once the film begins, it follows one subject, exploring all varieties of chaos possible within it, but in the end, it hopes that a beautiful order emerges out of the whole thing. A kind of beautiful harmony was born out of the mess.

Directed by Maciej Bochniak and written in collaboration with Slawomir Shuty, Freestyle is very certain that the harmony it is chasing will definitely be present in the end. There is hope to find the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. The ambition is what attracts one towards freestyle. There are loads of characters,...

Polish director Jan Komasa’s “Corpus Christi” was the biggest surprise of this year’s Oscar nominees in the Best International Feature Film category, slipping into the final five over a number of better-known films with its nuanced and electric portrait of a young ex-con masquerading as a priest at a rural church.

And now, a little more than five months after “Corpus Christi” lost to “Parasite” and debuted in theaters, Komasa is back with “The Hater.” Like the Oscar-nominated film, “The Hater” is about a feral, charismatic young man engaged in elaborate deceptions – but in this case, it’s set in a more modern and urban world of dance clubs and social media, where it’s harder for the film to have the same kind of impact as “Corpus Christi.”

The film was an early casualty of the coronavirus: Its early-March theatrical release in Poland ended prematurely because of the pandemic,...