Kino Mania is a website launched in 2021 by Giuseppe Sedia and devoted to Polish cinema. It features short pieces on Polish cinema in English functioning also as an archive of the reviews he wrote for the Krakow Post in the previous decade. Kino Mania contains as well a section about the “Polish Poster School” and the designs created for local film productions.
The font of the logo designed for Kino Mania is vaguely reminiscent of the emblem that identifies Kino Pod Baranami (“Cinema Under the Rams” in Polish), a local arthouse theater situated on the main square of the Old Town of Krakow. The logo also harks back to the facial features of Polish “James Dean-esque” actor Zbigniew Cybulski, whose cinematic appearances in the late 50s and 60s gained him a large cult following in his country.
The author of the reviews is strongly supportive of the equation for criticism proposed by Daniel Mendelsohn in “A Critic’s Manifesto” : KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT which is all but a quantitative formula. Nonetheless, all the short and long moving pictures, as well as documentary films featured in Kino Mania, have been assessed based on a 1-5 rating scale — half stars are not used. The only starless critiques are the ones about cinematic works labelled as “Polish Cinema Classics” and that are deemed worth watching, regardless.
Some of the reviews available in Kino Mania are, instead, about titles that were distributed only domestically in Poland. In some cases, they have been considered not good enough to deserve a screening in a theater or film festival abroad, at least in the reviewer’s view.