Opens: December 20
Genre: Art film/Period drama
Duration: 89 minutes

Anyone who saw Polish-British filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida, an austerely beautiful film that won a deserved Oscar for best foreign language film, knows loosely what to expect from this follow up. Those who missed it should prepare for a visual and aural treat that’s unlike anything else they’ll see in a contemporary cinema.

Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot in Cold War. Photographs supplied

Set in Warsaw, Berlin and Paris, this is an elliptically told story of an epic, on-and-off love affair, loosely based on the lives of the filmmaker’s parents (the main characters, musician Wiktor and singer Zula, played by Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig, are even named after them).

As if single-handedly attempting to revive the look and spirit of the great European art cinema of the 1950s and early 60s (the period in which it is set), the director has again employed a series of carefully and gorgeously composed black and white compositions. To further emphasise a distance from the rest of contemporary cinema, these are contained within the boxy old Academy ratio, the industry standard before widescreen images became the...