Then there’s the supposedly autobiographical source novel by Jerzy Kosiński (best known for Hal Ashby’s Being There), now generally accepted to be a work of fiction. The Painted Bird doesn’t make for ...

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 ...

Much has been made of the extreme and unrelenting violence that penetrates almost every scene of Václav Marhoul’s 169-minute “The Painted Bird,” in the grand tradition of “Come and See,” “The Tin Drum ...

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 ...

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 ...

“The Painted Bird” has been controversial ever since Jerzy Kosinski first published his novel in 1965. The grim story, about a young boy trying to survive in Eastern Europe during WWII, features acts ...

The Painted Bird will make you miserable. Watching it is akin to chugging back the black ooze that pumps through humanity’s dark heart, swallowing the vile and toxic swill hard, and asking for more, ...

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 ...

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 ...

I never made it all the way through Jerzy Kosinski’s bleak and brooding 1965 novel “The Painted Bird.” By the time I tried, it had won the National Book Award, and was being recommended to me by ...

Celebrity tends to destroy the artist -- just look at Orson Welles, Truman Capote or Marlon Brando, who spent their last years prattling away on the couches of Talk Show Nation. Or Jerzy Kosinski, ...