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

Variety reviews "Only Beautiful Things to Look At," a new film from Slovakian director Ivan Ostrochovský set in nineteen-eighties Czechoslovakia, during the state's program of suppressing the Roma population through coerced sterilization. According to Variety, the film painstakingly evokes the era's fashions and furnishings, but its handsome, oddly bloodless presentation gives the impression of a conventional period drama rather than a searing portrait of state-sanctioned cruelty. The verdict, as critic Jessica Kiang frames it, is admiring of the craft yet frustrated that the film feels muffled.

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