Please note: PFA's second-feature discount does not apply to The Decalogue. Instead, we offer a Decalogue Pass: tickets to the complete Decalogue at a 20 percent discount.

(Dekalog). In 1988 Kieslowski unveiled one of the most ambitious works of cinema ever created: a series of ten hour-long films, loosely based on the Ten Commandments, that reframed each commandment for the modern world. No fire and brimstone here, however; each episode eschewed religious arguments for a more difficult, even rarer theme: how humans interact not with God, but with one another. “I simply wanted to show that life is complicated,” wrote Kieslowski, “nothing more.” Though set in a run-down Warsaw housing block (“it's the most beautiful in Poland,” Kieslowski once said, “so you can imagine what the others are like”) and inspired by the director's sense of his country's “feeling of hopelessness, of worse yet to come,” The Decalogue is universal in its impact. Each section was shot by a different cameraman, and boasts a unique tone and approach; as a result, the parts stand on their own. But “in its entirety,” Stephen Holden of The New York Times claimed, “the cycle stands as a masterwork of modern cinema, essential viewing for anyone who cares about the movies as a serious art form.”

In Decalogue 1 (“I Am the Lord Thy God”), a university professor believes that the world can be understood through rational, mathematical thought. With their new computer as god and witness, he and his young son calculate that it's safe to skate on a just-frozen pond, but such “false gods” provide little comfort when tragedy strikes. The great actress Krystyna Janda (Man of Iron; Interrogation) stars in Decalogue 2 as a young woman who presents her mortally ill husband's doctor with a dilemma that forces him towards violating the commandment “Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord Thy God in vain.”