Dan Conley

The French title of the film suggests a double meaning — La Double Vie de Veronique. Double Vie (vee) is double life … but it sounds so close to Double V (vay), which is French for W. Or, to put it another way, La W de Veronique … Weronika, the Polish version of

In my opinion, Dekalog 4 is Kieslowski’s most difficult and essential artistic statement. This is a dense episode where 20 years of relational subtext comes bursting out, immediately and dangerously. The intense, forced audience trauma of Dekalog 4 is something I have rarely experienced outside of an Ingmar Bergman

Episode 4 of The Dekalog requires a trigger warning. Well, arguably, every episode the series demands one. Episode one, if you’ve lost a child, will devastate you. Episode 2 features abortion and infidelity, issues that trigger many. Episode 3 features infidelity, again, plus a very odd scene that evokes

I’m always amused to hear about various Eastern European superstitions and traditions, because they all have a quality of being made up in the moment. They always leave me wondering, are these actual widely shared beliefs common to region or just a family neurosis passed down through the ages?

About 15 years ago, I took a couple wonderful adult education classes at the Newberry Library in Chicago about the works of Nikolai Gogol. The class was taught by a Ukrainian woman who, naturally, spent some time making the case that Gogol is a Ukrainian writer even though his greatest

In the course of my many years of Montaigne analysis and study, if I walked away from it with one vital lesson — a lesson I consistently forget and have to relearn — it is this: all human beings are essentially unknowable. Montaigne is an ideal example. Here is a man who