SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

David Traversa Probably my contribution to this film is an unfair one, since I'm writing from a feeling that comes back to my memory when I see the title "Kanal" all of a sudden and some flashes appeared in my mind of that sensational film.I should see it again and study my reaction NOW, a totally different person from that young adult that I was when I saw this picture.I can recall leaving the movie theater when the film ended with a devastating sense of doom not only because of the total blackness of the movie but specially by its ending, absolutely crashing, morally and physically.Of course Hollywood would have never done such a dark movie and the feminine character would have walked thru the sewer system in some designer clothes, fully made up and coiffed to death, happily singing Che sara, sara --or Who's Sarah?-- (Doris Day as the protagonist? 1957 right?).I honestly believe that I never saw a most depressing movie in my whole life. Maybe "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini" (Sublime!!) but color photography helped to take it out of that terrible sense of doom we get from the black and white "Kanal".A MASTERPIECE, no doubt, but you must be in the right mood to watch it without getting dangerously depressed.

bbrooks94 Ashes and Diamonds may be better known, but of Wajda's 'War Trilogy', this is my personal favourite. With 'A Generation', we saw the shattered dreams and hopes of a future uprising before the war had begun and in 'Ashes and Diamonds' the anxious delirium and paranoia of post-war Poland. However, Kanal presents Poland during wartime. A disturbing, claustrophobic vision of madness told through the eyes of various Home Army resistance fighters in the dark sewers of Warsaw. I can't think of a more horrifying, intense or gloomy vision of war. Genuinely haunting, made more so by the eerie classical soundtrack and superb performances, especially from Vladek Sheybal as Michael, the artist who eventually succumbs to insanity and mournfully wanders the disgusting tunnels, playing a haunting melody on an ocarina as he does so. Yet, while incessantly miserable and pessimistic, it's a very beautiful, poetic and engaging film, directed and shot with such delicacy and precision.

loydmooney-1 Bravo. This is the kind of war story that movies were made for. It almost has a Robert Aldrich feel, something of the grim pessimism of his one set in Germany about the ones taking apart bombs, 10 seconds to hell, and because Wajda was able to use the leftover ruins still abounding from the war, well, seldom did war look so real. The great thing about the film is how everything is jam packed into this one, such a welter of emotions. When you get down to it there are not many great war movies, but this is one. And if there was even a movie to be watched in the dank cavern of a movie house,this is the one. Ashes and Diamonds is also quite good, but there Wajda was a bit preachy. Here the situation will not allow him to be anything but brutally honest.

info-399 A great film, at first viewing people may not understand some of the cultural references. The tall blonde brave sewer-runner is not a model of Aryan Uber Womanhood but that of a strong polish woman.According to the official line of Nazi Propaganda the metaphor for the Aryan woman was of a breeder , home maker not a woman that would take a pro-active role in dragging aman half way across the canals of Warsaw. I saw the movie as less of a metaphor for hell as that of an actual hell,the hell of siege such as stalingrad. Stalingrad was not a metaphor for hell it was hell on earth. As was Warsaw in the last days of organized rebellion.As much as Das Boot style brought across a sliver of the real life incident , Kanal's style brings across the desperation of the struggle in Warsaw. The optomistic saddness can be written off as slavic melancholy, or better described as the hope and sorrow of a nation that has many times been routed from the map of europe only to resurface strong and proud.Everything was taken from them and hope itself is in question as the final reel fades to black.