Rating: 
Summary: The critical life of a film
Review: "The Decalogue" is a series of 10 films based roughly on the Ten Commandments and is directed by the renowned Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. Each film or part of "The Decalogue" is about one hour in length and is independent of the other parts, but have some of the same characters in the background or in passing from other episodes. Although the films of "The Decalogue" are supposed to be, to some extent, based on the Ten Commandments -- there is not a direct commandment to episode relationship. Several of the episodes deal with adultery and some episodes deal with more than one commandment. Overall, I would say the stories themselves are depressing. Nevertheless, the plots are captivating and the way the stories are put together is intriguing. While watching these 10 films of "The Decalogue," you know are watching something great and know why Kieslowski is attributed with being clever at his craft. "The Decalogue" was originally aired on Polish television, but two episodes were expanded into the films "A Short Film About Love" and "A Short Film About Killing" (both about 1.5 hours long) and received a larger audience. "The Decalogue" includes many of Poland's most famous actors, including Boguslaw Linda, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Mirislaw Baka, and Krystana Janda. This new release of "The Decalogue" contains 3 disks, which include: * "Roger Ebert on The Decalogue"
* The 10 parts (or episodes) of The Decalogue series
* "On the Set of The Decalogue" (1988)
* "Kieslowski Meets the Press" (1988)
* "Kieslowski Known and Unknown" (1998) Furthermore, a small booklet is included that has information on the actors and information on "The Decalogue." As a set, this series will provide a lot of entertainment with a total running time of about 584 minutes. "The Decalogue" is in Polish with English subtitles.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth the experience, but...
Review: After watching all ten hours of The Decalogue (plus extras), I must say I wasn't all that impressed. It was worthwhile as the chance to see the early work of a director who later gained international repute, but not particularly entertaining or rewarding to actually view. The acting is terrific, some of the camera work and individual shots approach being memorable, and there were various interesting elements I'll discuss further in a moment. However, the picture quality is generally poor (understandable under the circumstances of creation), the subtitling is inconsistent, and the stories are all very gloomy and depressing except the tenth film. ("Decalogue Ten" was supposed to be "humorous" according to Kieslowski's comments in the brief "On The Set" featurette. I grinned once and never even chuckled at all. At least it wasn't so grim as the other nine tales.) As to the interesting aspects of these ten films, one is how the characters overlapped sometimes from film to film. and that's NOT including the "silent observer" who appears in each film, a linking element I found relatively pointless to the level of annoyance. Film critics apparently have a professional code that forces them to describe nearly every foreign film as a masterpiece. I'm not living under any such code, so I'm free to be honest and just say I didn't like The Decalogue all that much.
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