The remarkable Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland, is a Stalinist behemoth built in the 1950s to honor the “friendship” between Poland and the USSR. The aging building serves as a contemplative site for director Tomasz Wolski’s mesmerizing cinematography. The film’s classic observational methods drolly suggest that the Palace and its denizens embody a metaphor for society. We see an ecosystem of clashing uses (city council meetings, swimming and diving practices, theater performances) all thoroughly monitored Vegas casino-style by an incongruously light-hearted security team. Dodgy elevators and their operators, cats and catwalks, workers and performing artists and homeless people, all contribute to the diverse community of the Soviet-era Palace in a post-Soviet Poland.  NK