10 Certified Fresh 2014 Movies That Nobody Saw
1. Ida
Though a modest hit in France, Ida reached only $600,000 in UK cinemas last year. And that's despite an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, rave reviews, and the kind of religious controversy that usually at least manages to get the curious crowds in.
Controversy surrounded the fact that the film's central character, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), is a nun at a Polish convent who discovers she's really Ida Lebenstein, a Jewish orphan whose parents were killed during Nazi occupation. Together with her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), Anna/Ida seeks out her parents' bodies and their killers, along the way meeting a young musician (Dawid Ogrodnik) and feeling the pull of temptation.
Hardly as controversial as the synopsis might suggest, Ida is really a deeply human, starkly beautiful film about the impossibility of connection in a climate of mistrust. Having swapped one dictatorial regime for another, Ida's Poland circa 1962 now has Soviet Russia keeping the land locked in what seems like an eternal winter, in which Anna feels safer returning to the loneliness of the convent rather than involving herself in a land of brutal hostility.