Criterion Collection (Firm)

The story of a cocky Polish youth who decides to fight the Nazis after he falls for a pretty resistance leader. As he and his friends help escapees during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the innocence of a generation is lost under the grueling conditions of war. The first in what has come to be known as the director's 'war trilogy'.

"A sweeping, delirious romance [that] begins in the Polish countryside, where Wiktor, a musician on a state-sponsored mission to collect folk songs, discovers a captivating young singer named Zula. Over the next fifteen years, their turbulent relationship will play out in stolen moments between two worlds: the jazz clubs of decadent, bohemian Paris, to which he escapes, and the corrupt, repressive Communist Bloc, where she remains, universes bridged...

A husband, a wife, a stranger, a knife: Roman Polanski sets them all adrift on a weekend filled with simmering resentments and gut-churning suspense in his seminal psychological thriller.

A middle-aged journalist and his wife invite a footloose young hitch-hiker aboard their sail-boat for a Sunday outing in the Polish lake district. Like two peacocks, the men proceed to flaunt their virility before the woman, revealing a cynical sadism on the part of the husband and a growing resentment in the knife-wielding youth.

Follow a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters drawn ashore to explore life on land in an alternate 1980s Poland. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly auras make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit world of Smoczynska's imagining. The director gives fierce teeth to her viscerally sensual, darkly feminist twist on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," in which the girls' bond is tested and...

Rural Poland, on the last days of World War II. The Nazis have surrendered, and the Red Army has criss-crossed the country. With the battle against the Nazis over, a new struggle emerges against the communists. A group of Polish patriots boldy set out to assassinate a mid-level communist-party functionary. Macick is the trigger man, but when he spots a blonde behind the bar, his priorities change.

Maciek is a young Resistance fighter who is ordered to kill Szczuka, a Communist district leader, on the last day of World War II. The Soviet leader who has arrived in town to establish a new government. A mistake leads him to a beautiful barmaid who shows him what his life could be like and although killing has been easy for him in the past, Szczuka was a fellow soldier, and Maciek must decide whether to follow his orders.