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

| Jan 27, 2021

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

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

While not exploitative and (mostly) not gratuitous, this is as tough as it gets - you bleed for this kid. Even if it gets a bit too much, you just can't look away. Thrilling filmmaking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 8, 2020

There's a style and breadth to some of its imagery that contradict and complicate its ostensible realism in memorable ways... But its methods notwithstanding, The Painted Bird's endgame falls short.

| Jul 20, 2020

Brutal, the film is. Very powerful, except for slight manipulation.

| Jul 18, 2020

The effect is cumulative: you see how each successive horror really takes its toll on this kid and changes him. Impressively, it's done with little dialogue on [Peter Kotlár's] part.

| Jul 18, 2020

The Painted Bird is a potent, visceral but rewarding film for viewers who can withstand the onslaught of traumatizing moments.

| Jul 17, 2020

I must admit that staying with the film required steady purpose, but the experience, far from being numbing, was spellbinding. By the end there was no distance between me and the boy. I could see him thinking.

| Jul 17, 2020

All of this unvarnished evil is depicted with haunting beauty and uncompromising artistry.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 17, 2020

Impressive on a number of levels ... most of them technical.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 17, 2020

"The Painted Bird" is a challenging film, impressively and proudly hard to watch. It's also just a little too easy.

| Jul 16, 2020

The rest of the time it's more like a vulture picking at the carcass of history, and there's only so much meat on those bones.

| Original Score: C+ | Jul 16, 2020

The more likely question will be whether it was necessary for this film to adhere so closely to its source and chronicle a multitude of barbaric acts over its relatively long duration.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 16, 2020

Hard to watch and harder to forget, this searing adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński's bestseller by Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul spares nothing in showing the atrocities witnessed by anabandoned Jewish boy (Petr Kotlár) near the end of WW2.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 16, 2020

The film's emotional spectrum, a flat line of unyielding despair, is as limited as its color palette. And it settles into a pattern so dispiritingly repetitive (and repetitively dispiriting) it begins to resemble self-parody...

| Original Score: C+ | Jul 16, 2020