He garnered early praise for a string of documentaries in the 1990s and for his award-winning feature films of the 2000s, Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2004).

[6][7] The multi-award-winning Dostoevsky's Travels was a tragi-comic road movie in which a St Petersburg tram driver and the only living descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky, travels rough around Western Europe haunting high-minded humanists, aristocrats, monarchists and the Baden-Baden casino in his quest to raise money to buy a secondhand Mercedes.

[citation needed] Pawlikowski's most original and formally successful film was Serbian Epics (1992), made at the height of the Bosnian War.

[citation needed] Pawlikowski's transition to fiction occurred in 1998 with a small 50-minute hybrid film Twockers, a lyrical and gritty love story set on a sink estate in Yorkshire, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Ian Duncan.

[8] In 2006, he filmed about 60% of his adaptation of Magnus Mills' The Restraint of Beasts when the project was halted—his wife had fallen gravely ill and he left to care for her and their children.

[9] In 2011, he wrote and directed a film loosely adapted from Douglas Kennedy's novel The Woman in the Fifth, starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas.

The film is inspired by true events and cast Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara as an American couple in the 1930s, who leave behind civilization to live on a deserted island.

After his children left for university, Pawlikowski moved to Paris, and later relocated to Warsaw, where he lives close to his childhood home.