‘Only Beautiful Things to Look At’ Review: A Handsome but Muffled Portrait of State-Sanctioned Cruelty

Article excerpt

The fashions and furnishings of Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, the height of the state’s racist program of suppressing the Roma population through coerced sterilization, are painstakingly evoked in Slovakian filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovský’s “Only Beautiful Things to Look At.” But the film’s attractive yet oddly bloodless presentation gives the impression of a period drama […]