To mark the release of a mostly English-friendly DVD box set (English subtitles on all films, including the shorts, but the booklet is exclusively in Polish) and a tribute retrospective at Kinoteka, here’s my short introduction to the early work of Andrzej and Janusz Kondratiuk, two of Polish cinema’s more eccentric talents. As with many foreign comedies, I’m sure some of their best jokes went way over my head, but I found more than enough for those dependent on subtitles to get their teeth into. My favourite was the one I’d already seen, Hydro-Riddle, a Polish superhero film that’s fully aware of just how absurd the notion of a Polish superhero is (especially in the early 1970s), but I also liked the Formanesque Marriageable Girls.

My review of Wojciech Smarzowski’s scabrous The Dark House, an ultra-black comedy set either side of the 1981 martial-law crackdown in Poland that more than confirms the promise of his debut The Wedding (easily my favourite of the clump of post-2000 Polish films given a UK cinema release in 2007-08), has just been published as a web exclusive. It’s getting its British premiere at Kinoteka on 31 March prior to a screening in Edinburgh on 4 April – but if you can’t make those screenings, the Polish Blu-ray is definitely English-subtitled, and the DVD claims to be too.