YNOT at the Movies

The Czech-born Jewish German-language writer Franz Kafka spent his life feeling like an outsider in his own story, and Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland's new biopic "Franz" (Czech Republic/Poland/Germany/France/Turkey 2025 | in German/Czech | 127 min.) never quite lets an audience feel otherwise. The director once turned a Jewish teenager's survival inside the Hitler Youth into the wrenching "Europa Europa" (1990). Her latest film turns to a subject who never had to hide from anyone but himself. The picture has become a genuine sensation back home, sweeping nominations at this year's Czech Lion Awards. Holland deserves credit for attempting a fractured, non-chronological portrait instead of a conventional cradle-to-grave biopic, even if that ambition rarely catches fire on screen.

Franz Kafka (Idan Weiss) is sketched here as a mosaic rather than a linear biography, hopping between his prickly, impulsive youth under the roof of his domineering father Hermann (Peter Kurth) and his adult years fumbling through love affairs and a day job he despised. There are stretches where that fragmented approach genuinely captures a man who never experienced his own life as a tidy narrative. But the film keeps reaching past even that structure, cutting forward again into the present day to show tourists filing through the Kafka museum, and the seams between eras show. It's a clever idea in theory. In practice it undercuts the very gravity the film is trying to build, since it has to keep borrowing from Kafka's modern fandom to convince us the man mattered in the first place.

The bigger problem is Tomasz Naumiuk's camera, which treats a dinner table scene like something to be swung through rather than composed. It whips from face to face with a restlessness that reads as disorienting more often than expressive, and by the second act the constant movement becomes exhausting rather than immersive. Combined with a Kafka who is written as difficult to warm to on purpose, eccentric, impulsive, and often unlikeable, the film has trouble giving an audience anywhere to land.

Weiss commits fully to that prickliness, and there's a real performance buried in his fidgeting, wounded stares. But a biopic that keeps its subject at arm's length needs either a formal control the camerawork doesn't have, or a magnetism the writing doesn't give him.

What's stranger still is how little the film is interested in the words that made Kafka worth a movie at all. For a story about a writer, the film spends almost no time asking why the writing mattered, what made it strange, or why it outlived him. Watching it feels like picking up a handsome mug at the museum shop as a souvenir: proof that you were there, without any real understanding of the writer or his work, and why Franz's name is on the mug.

"Franz" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, August 21, 2026.