Joanna Kulig

Joanna Kulig’s performance in “Cold War” is so astonishingly captivating and commanding and downright brilliant, that it feels like a classic performance delivered by an immortal screen goddess from the golden age of film. Pawel Pawlikowski’s penetrating black and white and impeccable direction helps, but this Polish masterpiece, short-listed for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is impossible to imagine without Kulig. In this half hour she talks about how her music training came in handy while shooting the intricate moving camera shots in the film, and she ponders what it means when someone says she’s “so natural.”  Plus she reveals how Pawlikowski helped her often simply by saying the words “Lauren Bacall.”