Film Review: The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin
In what's already been a great year for underappreciated Polish auteurs comes the latest box set from Radiance, The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin. The three films collected here, all taken from Szulkin's loosely connected 1980s Apocalypse tetralogy, are science fiction at their most grimy and grounded, a distant cry from the fantastical whimsy of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom occurring in contemporaneous America. And while the omission of the first entry in that tetralogy, Szulkin's feature debut Golem (1980), seems odd, this set still marks the best way to see Szulkin's unsettling visions of life under oppressive police state rule.