Why You Missed It

Widest U.S. release: nine theaters.

Should You Keep Missing It?

Raise your hand if you've ever postponed watching a film about genocide or other historical atrocities. I sure have. You already know about it, the logic goes, and it's not like you're going to enjoy seeing it. If you do enjoy it, there's something wrong with you. So why subject yourself to a film like this unless you're watching it in a class or at a solemn film festival where everyone can achieve catharsis in a post-film discussion?

Why? Well, Rithy Panh gets that. He gets that we don't go to the movies for a grim recital of horrors (which we could just as easily read in a history book), but to satisfy our imaginations, to be transported by all the resources of art. And he gives us that transportation in ways that are both horrifying and (occasionally) beautiful.

This isn't a prosaic documentary, but an elegy that cuts abruptly, without explanation, to shots of ferocious ocean waves battering the camera. It offers the facts, but also, and more centrally, the feelings. We watch the clay figures "die"; then we see them "reborn," free, dressed again in their colorful pre-revolutionary attire and soaring across a painted sky.

Those toys begin to seem more human than the laughing children of the propaganda footage, who represent an image far from Panh's remembered reality. Cinema, he notes, was a victim of the Khmer Rouge, which closed theaters and killed off the leading lights of Cambodia's film industry. One party-assigned director died for capturing images that didn't reflect the ideologically approved version of reality.

What would it be like to lose your entire life so you could enter someone else's heaven — to be forced, in essence, into a nationwide cult? When we contemplate such things, our minds shut off. Using his increasingly battered clay figures, posing them in ways that mimic children's play, Panh finds a way back into our imaginations. He forces us to put ourselves in the scenario, then gives us small instances of defiance and resilience to keep us sane.

Verdict: A film to place beside The Act of Killing. One is a character study in evil and the other an act of artistic witnessing and mourning. But both offer reasons to dwell on the unthinkable, suggesting that these are horrors humanity is better off not forgetting, lest they repeat themselves.

This Week in Theaters

At the Savoy: Snowpiercer, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia and the reissue of A Hard Day's Night.

At the Roxy: Walking the Camino, Walking With the Enemy.

At the Palace: Paul Haggis returns with Third Person.

Most everywhere: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

This Week in Your Living Room

Bad Words, Jodorowsky's Dune, Nymphomaniac, Vols. 1 & 2, The Raid 2, Le Week-End.