The Painted Bird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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.

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

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