Without fanfare, and even less than a faint promise, it allows us to believe in a chance for something better. How, I don’t know, but I feel it deep in my bones.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 5, 2024

It reflects, with an atmospheric black and white, a study about evil without borders that lacerates child innocence at times of war, but in its almost three hours it gets lost in a routine of dull and banal episodes of suffering. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 10, 2023

It’s pitiless and unyielding conviction forces us to endure scene after scene of appalling cruelty, daring us to grow numb to it and therefore proving its bigger point.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

The totality of this piece is impressive but eventually suffocates under the weight of its own ambitious scope.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 5, 2022

The film's cold rendering of passages from the book never gets inside the boy's headspace

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 18, 2022

Bottomless suffering transformed into aesthetically exhilarating art.

| Mar 30, 2021

Few films are this tough to sit through-or difficult to forget.

| Jan 27, 2021

It has something to say about redemption and how we bring society back from the abyss. As such, it's a powerful piece of work, a landmark in Czech cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 30, 2020

Perhaps the best film of 2020.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 29, 2020

Definitely not for the fainthearted.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 13, 2020

For all its overworked grotesqueries, it attempts an intriguing climb from the deepest pits of horror towards some kind of stoic grace.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 22, 2020

It's heavy watching and certainly difficult for some to stomach. But the film draws you in with its slow moving camera that paints the scenes in a hauntingly beautiful black and white.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 16, 2020

The Painted Bird is undeniably impressive, artful and powerful.

| Oct 12, 2020

The horror of the content aside, this is a stunningly beautiful film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 7, 2020

Even with its aestheticising filter of black and white, The Painted Bird is a bleak marathon of torture porn that is exhausting to endure.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 16, 2020

Deals in visual poetry that compels attention even as it wallows in unkindness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 14, 2020

The sequence of events is so relentlessly brutal as to become numbing, almost comical.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 12, 2020

It's much easier, says The Painted Bird, to simply throw our hands in the air and declare humanity doomed.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 12, 2020

The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2020

With rare commitment, Marhoul sets himself to portraying such all-consuming human depravity, the only response is to crumple.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 9, 2020