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 ...

Václav Marhoul's black-and-white film is an epic portrait of inhumanity in the tradition of "Come and See" and "The Tin Drum." Much has been made of the extreme and unrelenting violence that ...

“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 ...

Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul discusses his controversial Holocaust-set drama, why it’s less violent than “Joker,” and how his upcoming Joseph McCarthy movie is a rebuke of Trump. Entertainment ...

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 ...

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 ...

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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, ...

The German-born actor has carved a niche playing lowlifes, and his demented turn in Czech Republic's Oscar contender "The Painted Bird" is no exception. In “The Painted Bird,” the German actor with ...

Stellan Skarsgård, Harvey Keitel and Udo Kier star in this phantasmagorical horror about eastern Europe that saw half the Venice audience walk out. I couldn’t look away One day they’ll make a film ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. This image released by IFC Films shows Petr Kotlár in a scene from "The Painted Bird." (IFC Films via AP) This image released by ...