Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published “The Painted Bird” by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty.

Writer-director Václav Marhoul spent 11 years working on “The Painted Bird,” his nearly three-hour adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński’s harrowing novel about a young Jewish boy who is subjected to ...

If you think the black-and-white Czech film “The Painted Bird” will fulfill your monthly boring-art quota, just wait until the scene in which a nympho gets it on with a goat! Oh, the movie is ...

In recent years, I’ve noticed the emergence of a new strain of films centered around the Holocaust. It began in 2015 with Hungarian director László Nemes’ disorienting Son of Saul, which played around ...

An epic pastoral horror pitting human savagery against the impossible calm of nature, Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul’s adaptation of Polish author Jerzy Kosiński’s rattling World War II novel “The ...

An extraordinary piece of filmmaking I hope never to see again, Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird” is a pulverizing movie experience from which one cannot look away. Adapted from Jerzy Kosiński’s ...

How do you begin to describe Václav Marhoul’s gorgeously grotesque masterpiece, “The Painted Bird”? It’s not just something you’ve never seen before, it’s revolutionary in its tone, design and ...

Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird” begins with utter bleakness but over the course of its 169-minute running time, keeps finding lower depths of misery. When it premiered last fall at the Venice Film ...

Jerzy Kosinski’s horrific novel about an unnamed boy wandering around Eastern Europe at the close of World War II is sensitively adapted for the screen in 'The Painted Bird,' Czech director Vaclav ...

A version of this story about “The Painted Bird” first appeared in the International Film issue of TheWrap’s Oscar magazine in November 2019. Writer-director Václav Marhoul spent 11 years working on ...

The Painted Bird is theatre of cruelty at its most literal. Brutally faithful to Polish author Jerzy Kosinski’s controversial 1965 novel of the same name (once considered unfilmable), its hellish ...