ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

rps-2 If you like nifty nail biters, this is your movie. It's as exciting as 007. But this is a true story. Apart from the suspense, which kept me on the edge of my chair for two hours, this film also superbly captures the grim atmosphere of the Soviet bloc in the seventies and the unpleasant bureaucracy (and unpleasant people) of the communist military. It's also a nice touch to set it in wintertime Warsaw. There is a totally surprising ending (even if it is a true story) the message of which seems to be that the American security establishment is every bit as ominous as its communist counterparts. I rated this a nine rather than ten only because I thought it was a little too long and because of the car chase at the end which was a needless Hollywood touch to a movie that does extremely well without Hollywood.The level of violence is not offensive although one suicide scene is perhaps a little more graphic than most of us would like. But if you enjoy spy pictures, you'll LOVE this one.

Christy Leskovar Excellent movie, based on a true story, a cold war spy thriller. Very well done and worth seeing. It's about a Polish army officer who spies for the CIA. It's a Polish movie, with subtitles. The Americans are played by American actors, so those parts are in English. His CIA handler is played by Patrick Wilson (Lou in the current season of Fargo). The actor who plays Jaruzelski you'd think was Jaruzelski. Some of the Polish dialogue goes by so fast it's difficult to read it all, so it's nice seeing it on TV so you can go back. I saw it on Netflix. The opening scene is horrible, I didn't watch. There's a bit of bad language, but not a lot.

TxMike After learning about this movie, which I found on Netflix streaming, I was curious to see who played the role of Jack Strong. Only after I saw the movie did I realize that there wasn't any Jack Strong, that was a code name for the Polish military man who cooperated with NATO and the USA to reveal many of the Soviet secrets and planned attacks, possibly including nuclear attacks.All this is based on a real person, Ryszard (ree-shard) Kuklinski (played well by Marcin Dorocinski), a Polish Colonel. He was a good man and when he realized how terrible the Soviet military plans were he secretly contacted the US Embassy in Germany and offered himself as a spy. He operated in this manner from 1972 to 1981, reportedly passing 35,000 pages of secret documents during that time. He only quit when the Soviets were getting hot on his trail, at which time he, his wife, and his two sons were secretly transported out of East Germany to safety. They ended up in the USA. Patrick Wilson was fine in a critical but understated role as "Daniel", the US contact for his spying activities. I would guess that is a composite character.This movie does a great job of showing the situation during the cold war, between WW2 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the USSR. We'll never know but it is possible, without Kuklinski motivated to do a good thing and help ward off all-out war, all of us may have been plunged into a devastating nuclear war back then.Some English but most in Polish and Russian with English subtitles.

ulfahl69 Possible that Kukliński was a double agent, of the Soviet GRU, used in an operational game with the CIA. A Polish Minister of Internal Affairs during communist times, Czesław Kiszczak revealed such a theory in a later interview, while a former Soviet military attaché, Yuriy Rylyov, claimed so directly in an interview. Historians, like Paweł Wieczorkiewicz and Franciszek Puchała (a general in the Polish Army during communist times) suggest, that the knowledge Kukliński had was exaggerated, and while he had a lot of information about the Polish Army and the organization of the Warsaw Pact in general, he could not have had detailed information on Soviet plans, since no one in Poland had it. Puchała supported his opinion in official hearings of Kukliński by Polish prosecutors during his revised trial. Revealing plans about the enforcement of martial law in Poland, which would make a Soviet invasion unnecessary, could have been profitable for the Soviet side, ensuring that the USA would not be surprised by martial law and would not undertake unpredictable actions against the Soviets. It is noteworthy, that despite Kukliński's revelations, the USA did not warn Solidarity about martial law. The Soviets took the escape of such an important spy nonchalantly and did not demand any consequences from the Polish politician responsible for intelligence, namely Czesław Kiszczak. Also, the matter of Kukliński's sons' deaths is unclear and they may have been part of a protection program; besides, according to Wieczorkiewicz, such revenge on a defector's family would be quite unusual for Soviet intelligence.