Recensioni de* critic*

Once you know the real story that inspired Cold War, it’s easy to understand why the filmmaker, as well as his camera, idealizes these two restless, complicated souls, seducing us into loving them as he does.

Like Cuarón’s film [Roma], Pawlikowski’s is a biography of his parents. By the end things get lugubrious, as they often do in relationships at that point.

[Cold War allows] for luxurious images and an anachronistic sensibility. Yet the film’s lovers are trapped in an obsessively enduring relationship, one that exists in a cocoon of its own making, separate from the world and not always emotionally available to viewers.

A near-perfect film, an artfully crafted, flawlessly acted meditation on love, memory and invented history that’s both deeply personal and politically attuned... This ode to erotic desire and sociological fate shimmers with a captivating, sensuous beauty that begins with two preternaturally charismatic lead actors and gains force with a visual and sound design every bit as sensual and alluring as the film’s magnetic human elements.

From the first, watching Cold War we know—with joy and relief—that we’re in the hands of an artist with vision, an artist whose aesthetics will shape and give meaning to his material. The film has a grand story to tell, but it’s as much about the telling as the story itself.

Of course, Cold War’s Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot do consummate their love to an extent In the Mood For Love’s Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung do not—but the Poles’ pan-European exodus percolates with the same sadness of Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 masterwork, bursting with an ineffable sense of timelessness only the classics exude.

The staccato structure lets us bask in this beautiful love–all longing looks and piano trills and torch songs and blond bangs and limbs entwined on a cobblestone streets–without getting bogged down by the geopolitical and personal suffering it causes.

Cold War is a gorgeous, unyielding heartbreaker. A romance and a tragedy stretching across decades, it’s rich and allusive, a movie that promises to take its audience seriously and then delivers on that promise.

A haunted romantic epic in miniature, like a novel written with the careful, precise economy of a short story... [Pawlikowski] creates a gripping present tense from the clarity and efficiency of his storytelling: No matter how often he lurches us forward in time, we remain locked into the emotional sphere of his characters.

“Cold War” smolders and even burns with the gorgeous, intoxicating atmosphere of star-crossed romance... Passionate, tempestuous, haunting and assured, [the film is] a potent emotional story with political overtones that plays impeccably today.

Pawlikowski distills staggering amounts of story into austere monochrome images so deeply expressive you could dive into them... [Cold War] is Pawlikowski second-straight masterwork, only one with a critical if seldom-seen error. His movie is too short.

A darkly beautiful romance... [Cold War] is mysteriously ravishing, so much so that you either forget it isn’t in color or take the rich blacks and radiant whites to be colors in their own right