Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

alexdeleonfilm KATYN: A stunning Grande Finale evokes a Silence of the Lambs ~ Viewed at the Annual Polish film week in Gdynia, September 18, 2007. The latest film by 81 year old Polish director Andrej Wajda, "KATYN" concerning the mass murder of Polish Prisoners of War perpetrated by the Russians in 1940 and for years either hushed up or cynically blamed on the Germans, is more than just another film by a famous director. It has become a "cause celèbre" and a national event stirring up the collective Polish memory of this incredible Russian atrocity"Katyn" is the name of a forest area outside of the city of Smolesk where over a three day period in May, 1940, 15,000 Polish POWs, mostly officers, were taken by the truckload and methodically dispatched one by one with a single bullet to the nape of the neck by agents of Stalin's NKVD. The nefarious purpose was to try to ensure that after the war there would be no high-level Polish military cadre left to oppose the Russification and Communization of Poland. (Talk about thinking ahead!)Stylistically, "Katyn" was apparently shot in "classical style" and, Mr. Wajda has stated that this is "the last film of the Polish School" -- a reference to the period of post-war Polish films of the fifties which put Poland on the international cinema map and of which a very young Wajda was the leading lightAs for the film itself, it turned out to be more like a religious experience than the mere viewing of a motion picture – which is not to say that "Katyn" is not successful on cinematic grounds alone – just that the cumulative effect was overwhelming – truly Over-Whelming. The picture starts in the middle of a bridge on dateline September 17, 1939 – a date which every Pole knows to be the infamous day on which the Russians invaded from the East to crush Poland and divide it up between themselves and the German invaders from the west. Crowds of civilians mixed with soldiers fleeing the Krauts run into another crowd fleeing the Russians –What to do? ~ One young woman with a small child tries to persuade her soldier husband to discard his uniform and flee with her to the relative safety of Krakow in the South. "I am an officer of the Polish Army – I can't do that" he states, invoking the aristocratic Polish military code which Wajda has called into question in many other films. – and so he falls into Russian custody, from which he will never return. Already the die of the film is cast and the subsequent events – the internment of the officers, the women back home trying to find out what happened to their men – the official lies – the cynicism – the desperate attempts to find out, the clinging to hope against hope and the frustration which is the body of the film, are all things completely, if painfully, familiar to just about every person in this country, even today. There are too many people still alive who went through it all. The bulk of the film takes place on the "home front" with notable female roles, especially dark-haired Maja Ostaszewska, to single out just one of several powerful distaff figures, and there is one important Russian character, an officer who tries to protect one of the protesting Polish women, played by the very popular Russian actor Sergei Garmash – a subtle indication that this film is not specifically anti-Russian – and then comes the Grand Finale.Switch to Katyn Forest. The trucks come rumbling in. The Polish officers are unloaded, one by one – and one by one shot in the back of the head – shoved screen forward into a gaping hole in the ground – bang-bang – push-push – plop-plop into the ditch – bodies with bloodied heads stacked up neatly like sacks of potatoes – then comes the bulldozer shoving loose dirt practically out of the screen and into the laps of the audience to cover up the obscenity – one upraised hand clutching a string of black rosary beads is the last to go under -- Screen goes black. End titles roll. No music. No sound. Nothing. Dead silence. One tiny flimsy attempt at a clip-clap is drowned out by the Silence of the Lambs as the audience files out without a word …No number of stars can rate this film.

CinemaClown Based on a true incident that took place in the Katyn forest during World War 2 where Russian army slaughtered 20,000 Polish prisoners of war and then put the blame of the massacre on Nazi Germany, Katyn tells its harrowing tale through the eyes of Polish officers' wives, mothers, sisters & daughters, but on an overall scale, this film really failed to live up to my expectations. The depiction of Russians & Germans and their blame game is captured very well and there are some tense moments also which it is able to deliver but this motion picture kind of loses itself in the middle in which the plot feels highly fragmented but then in the final moments, Katyn makes an impressive return to deliver a brutal, powerful & haunting final punch to bow out with some respect.

Movie Review OK, I may have a spoiler so beware!!! Anyway, if you're a history buff, especially of WWII, you probably already know the story behind the Katyn forest. Nevertheless, it occurred to me while watching this film that the Polish army was made up of about 8-10% Jews, which was roughly the equivalent percentage of the population. And if you've read first-hand accounts about German-held POWs at the very beginning of the war (for example, the Shoah project), then you realize that Polish soldiers underhandedly betrayed their Jewish (and Polish) brethren soldiers to the Germans in exchange for extra food, blankets, shoes, or what have you. Not all but enough did. There is no mention of this in the film. However, the film makes a point that the Polish POWs held by both the Germans and Soviets were Gentiles, probably Catholic. And while I'm not belittling what happened to pro-Western Polish partisans during both the German and the Soviet occupation of Poland, it seemed a little strange those that had influence in the film ignored that nearly every Jew in Poland was either murdered or, had they survived the war, emigrated to Israel after-wards. Therefore, one's neighbors' apartments were looted and taken over had they been owned by Jews of Poland. And while the plight of the families of those murdered by the Soviets at Katyn is no small tragedy, it really pales in comparison to that of Polish Jews. I understand that this is a story about Katyn. But the irony of course is that while some in Poland were no doubt happy about the Jews being deported and gassed, their Christian brothers, who happened to be their neighbors in Germany, occupied a predominantly Christian country (Poland) and brutally murdered very many Gentile Polish civilians as well. That is the irony that no one talks about. Just food for thought.

secondtake Katyn (2007)A striking, gorgeous, sad sad movie.I'm not sure I like the idea that this is a deeply poetic movie about such genocidal horrors. But it is, beyond the usual. It's downright gorgeous, and lyrical, and timeless. It's quite an extraordinary visual experience, and it moves through beautiful forested and old world urban landscapes that are wonderful to just look at.But that's not the point at all. Or at least, the mass murder by the Soviets of Polish officers in WWII is made more horrible by placing the crimes against such beauty. It amplifies how really wrong it is. That war, and the crimes of war, are inherently against nature. And good moral sense.The pace is what you might call elegiac. That is, it is not quite slow, but it moves as a boat down a river might, with eloquence. I'm not sure that's enough, in the long run, to make it sublime (as sublime as it intends) but is really is close to a kind of cinematic poetry.There are many great performances here, none of them splashy. There are beauties here (women and men both) but no star power, nothing distracting. What matters most of all is a reminder, a realignment even, about historical facts, and the cruelty of the Soviets against the Poles, even as they were fighting the Nazis. Then of course Poland was under Soviet rule for decades, so a movie like this was only possible recently. And a movie this powerful, and this disturbing, and this beautiful, is remarkable. Watch it closely