The Act of Killing

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

(Not rated)

****

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Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has made “one of the most lucid portraits of evil I’ve ever seen,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. Fascinated by the apparent remorselessness of men who had carried out a mass slaughter in Indonesia nearly 50 years ago, the Texas native convinced several of these butchers to re-enact their horrifying exploits for his cameras—staging the action in whatever cinematic style pleased them most. Though the faux Westerns, gangster dramas, and musicals that the subjects dream up can be “bizarre to the point of trippiness,” Oppenheimer’s film makes the horror inescapable. He’s “obviously treading on dicey moral ground here,” empowering monsters to romanticize their stories, said Bob Mondello in NPR.org. But his intent becomes clearer when one of killers becomes physically ill as the playacting finally causes his demons to surface. The Act of Killing is a movie that will make you run from the theater, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. You’ll run “both to escape the awful things the film is showing you and to tell everyone you know that they need to see it too.”