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

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 […]

By Jessica Kiang