Franz

Acclaimed writer-director Agnieszka Holland’s (Green Border, Europa Europa) most ambitious work to date is not so much a biopic as a restlessly shapeshifting object, by turns fevered and funny, that gives cinematic form to Franz Kafka’s inner world as much as his outsize afterlife across literature, language, and pop culture. In nonlinear fashion, the film follows the great 20th-century Czech writer from childhood in late-Habsburg Prague to his final illness, tracing throughout how his fiction—including a wild, fleeting visualization of “In the Penal Colony”—was born from familial conflicts, contradictory erotic desires, office life, and the city itself, which will eventually, as Holland slyly folds in, sell his face as a souvenir. Hardly a traditional portrait of the artist, Franz gets thrillingly close to understanding Kafka by refusing to pin him down to any one interpretation. A Cohen Media Group release.