If you’re making a movie about something truly ugly and detestable, does that mean you shouldn’t let the photography be too pretty? I said a week or so ago that Lajos Koltai’s Fateless “is the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?)…situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.” And today N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott is making more or less the same point: “The visual beauty of [the film] is unmistakable, and also a bit disconcerting…[there is verisimilitude] in Fateless and yet one finds oneself noticing, along with the emaciated bodies and ambient cruelty, the delicacy of the light and the painterly composition of the frames.”