Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Judging from the lack of reviews this movie isn't very well known, but it is quite funny. The main character is a con man who seems pathologically driven to take on new identities at the drop of a hat. He then runs scams using the new identity. The movie has a light touch, and though the humor might be a bit dry for some, I found it to be very funny throughout. It seems that some of the scams he runs are facilitated by the vagaries of the communist system that Poland was under at the time, and since the movie came out in 1989 I'm sure it was an intentional critique of a crumbling hierarchy. The funniest sequence is the last one, in which our hero of many names becomes a high-level dignitary until his luck inevitably runs out. Beautifully done.