The Painted Bird
Dir: Václav Marhoul (2hrs 49mins) (18)
★★★★
Graphic depictions of traumatic violence and sexual depravity had many audience members groping for the exits when premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Based on Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel, it’s an “endurance test”, sparing nothing in showing the atrocities inflicted on an abandoned Jewish boy named Joska (Petr Kotlár) as he makes his way home across the “ravaged” landscape of Eastern Europe during the Second World War. He is sold as a slave, buried up to his neck in mud, forced to watch as a miller (Udo Kier) gouges out a man’s eyes with a spoon, placed by a “well-meaning” priest (Harvey Keitel) into the care of a paedophile (Julian Sands), who rapes him – and so on, for almost three hours.
The Painted Bird
Kosinski’s book caused controversy when it turned out he might have lied about its autobiographical accuracy, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, but it had a “staying power” the film lacks. Director Václav Marhoul seems uninterested in history and politics. His catalogue of horrors is simply “nihilistic” – an almost Fellini-esque “circus of the grotesque” – and the “otherworldly beauty” of the black-and-white cinematography feels wrong, given the film’s exclusive focus on “the nature of evil”. It certainly falls some way short of being the “gruelling masterpiece” Marhoul doubtless intended, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. But as Joska scrawls his name, “pugnaciously”, on a window in the last shot, I felt that through his will to endure, the film had mustered an authentic allegorical power, ascending from horror towards “some kind of stoic grace”.
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is undoubtedly formulaic, said Kevin Maher in The Times. But it rises far above the pack thanks to a “wickedly funny” screenplay from writer-director Natalie Krinsky ( and an “indecently charismatic” turn from rising Australian star Geraldine Viswanathan. She plays Lucy, a “harried” New York gallery assistant who gets dumped by her boyfriend and fired from her job after a drunken launch party disaster. Leaping into the wrong car as she escapes, she meets sensitive wannabe hotelier Nick (Dacre Montgomery). Romantic tension builds, but she’s still hung up on her ex; so she and Nick come up with a plan to ease her heartache by turning the lobby of his hotel into a museum for the memorabilia of failed relationships.
The Broken Hearts Gallery
Gossip Girl)
Despite this unusual development, the plot remains “default romcom”, even down to the final grand declaration of love in a public place, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian. Still, there are many “smart-relatable” lines, to which Viswanathan (hitherto best known for her “movie-stealing supporting turns” in and brings an “excitable sense of fun and fast-talking wit”. The whole thing had a “precociously witty synthetic tingle”, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety, with great performances, too, from Phillipa Soo and Molly Gordon as the heroine’s close friends. As with the film as a whole, “just because they’re not deep doesn’t mean they’re not fun”.
The Package)
Blockers
In cinemas.