Who payed the critics

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

.......................................................from Pasto,Colombia...Via: L.A. CA., CALI, Colombia & ORLANDO, FL Katyn makes it painfully clear that the truth was a very scarce commodity throughout decades of Soviet domination. Considering Katyn was released nearly 20 years after the end of the Communist/Soviet era in Poland. It seems, to me at least, somewhat baffling that it took Polish film-makers so long to share these tragic and poignant true events with the world.In historical retrospect, Nazi atrocities perpetrated against Poland and its people have been well circulated and repeated tirelessly over past decades. On the other hand, there has been a virtual dearth of information regarding Soviet atrocities. "WWII was triggered by the German blitzkrieg invasion of Poland in September, 1939." is what we Americans have been told ad nauseam for decades. What is rarely ever mentioned is the simultaneous eastern invasion of Poland by Soviet forces! While Nazi aberrations such as Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto have been chronicled in numerous well-known films, this marks the first time, in my recollection at least, that Soviet war crimes have been dealt with openly and clearly in a movie. Katyn relates this true war time story through the interwoven lives of a dozen or so family members and friends. Within minutes of viewing, the story had me totally in its grip, and even though the eventual outcome is a historical fact we are all keenly aware of, the story unfolded in such a way as to never lose my interest.9*.....ENJOY/DISFRUTELA! Any comments, questions or observations, in English o en Español, are most welcome!

This film failed to explain why stalin ordered to kill all the officers. that was still a mystery to me after watching it. it didn't have any scenes from the Russian's perspective at all. that could have made this film much more powerful. it was just one side of story. it also didn't explain in a deeper level why the russians decide to make false accusations against the German as who killed those officers.the film itself is too long and gets boring in some scenes, and it has random short stories.it does have good cinemaphotography.the history event itself is sad, but this film didn't make me feel emotional.

Katyn is a curious; plodding and often dull war film delving into the horrors of World War Two that befell not soldiers on any sort of front line, nor the innocents and ethnic minorities who were the victims of the genocide, but is closer to a sort of best of both worlds: the prisoners of war and varying other personnel who were massacred at the Polish locale of Katyn, something forever linked to German instigation until it came to everyone's attention the Soviets were actually to blame. In spite of its setting, subject matter and quite obvious positive ethic on the subject, it is disappointingly droll; a stilted and eerily unmoving account of an event during the Second World War I knew nothing of, and barely got anything out of, bar the fact such a slice of history had been introduced to me where previously I was ignorant.I think above all else, the most disappointing aspect of the film is how it cannot quite pull off any sort of Nazi demythification process that is almost certainly inherent in the film's premise: to depict how we all got it wrong all this time. The event upon which the entire film is based is the Katyn massacre, something which brought about the deaths of an array of war struck Poles, and of which for decades saw the Germans pencilled in as the aggressors with all attempts to blame the true perpetrators (the Russians) most likely greeted with sneers; frowns and shakes of the head as the liberals look on in shock at the stubbornness of the Far-Right STILL yet unable to both come to terms as well as admit their foul play. The brutal, and quite clinical, nature whereby the Katyn massacre plays out calls to mind the best of those sorts of scenes from Holocaust films past and how we've so often seen those of a German ilk play out the role of aggressor: for here, they wear Russian uniforms.That's not to say Katyn is sympathetic of the Nazi's, but it damn well comes close to trying to get it into people's heads that war-time propaganda can be a load of nonsense and pop-culture depictions (Nazis: evil; Soviets: our uneasy allies who crusaded for us in The East) can often ring false. The film will open on a bridge, a busy bridge in a Polish city as people flee the locale east on account of the invading German army. As they do so, they meet a hurried crowd coming at them from the opposite direction: other Poles fleeing west on account of the invading Russian army and the question of choosing an apparent lesser of two evils are first implemented unto the audience. We follow a handful of characters, none of whom are that interesting and none of whom have their tales resonate. In fact, they are not so much characters as much as there are entities whom occupy the space on screen so that we may advance to a quite shocking scene depicting the truth.Where there are people on screen, they arrive in the form of a young woman named Ann (Ostaszewska), who has lost her husband to the conflict, but he is missing in action more-so killed already. Her husband, Andrzej (Zmijewski), is the man in question and we watch his father, Jan (Kowalski), occupy the frame during some of the more obligatory scenes during films of this nature: his role at the local university terminated as the structure itself is closed down by the Nazis on those typically fascist grounds forever linked to inequality and such. These people are not interesting, but the film isn't necessarily interested IN them; their presence and the premise to their scenarios a sort of shared, congealed item of imprisonment as Andrzej is stuck in a labour camp; Ann is imprisoned by her circumstance of being on the run and Jan is imprisoned by his own grief out of losing his university and son. These characters rarely get above the stage of being much more than your standard war genre stock personnel, whereas there are additionally too many of them while they often flit in and out of the text – sharing the core importance amongst them as they disappear and then reappear. Character study is not important, a sense of demythificaion is.As far as war films go, it isn't the intriguing battle of wits between two men that Schindler's List was, itself making a point (in the simplest of forms) about how "good" or how "evil" Nazis were. Nor is it the deathly effective tale of one person's survival on the front line that The Pianist or Come and See was; the film does not necessarily depict anybody that interesting, it is not Downfall and the piece is far from a resistance thriller of any nature. So what is it? An awareness piece - barely much more than an awareness piece that sort of wants to bite off a bit from each of these approaches. You might say it was an overly long history lesson building to an important event just so as to reach out to a wider body of people and get across the message that a miscarriage of justice befell the Nazis for so long.

"Katyn" is a fictional treatment of an incident that is seared into the memory of every Pole. During the period of cooperation between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, Soviet troops took 12,000 Polish officers into the forest and killed them one by one, shooting them in the back of the skull. The Soviets claimed the murders had been committed by the Nazis and after the USSR seized Poland, it became very dangerous for anyone to blame the Soviets although the truth was widely known.This film personalizes this horrendous tale by turning it into fiction. The Polish officers and members of their families become real people, and the film tells vividly what happened to each of its characters: those who were slaughtered, those who hoped against hope that their husbands, brothers and sons had escaped the fate of their comrades, and those who knew and insisted on telling the truth (which was ultimately acknowledged not long ago by the Russians).The movie incorporates some material from newsreels filmed when the bodies were found. But the rest is a meticulous and unsparing recreation by director Andzrej Wadja and his team. The cast, although generally unknown to American audiences, is excellent and the sense of terror is palpable, particularly after the Soviet Union has taken control of Poland and is determined to crush anyone who says that they and not the Nazis, perpetrated the atrocities at Katyn.This film is no more fun to watch than a movie about the Holocaust but it preserves an important historical event more effectively than any documentary could possibly do. In case you're wondering, I'm not Polish. But I believe this is an event that must not be brushed out of history.