See all of our newslettersFar from the standard birth-to-death chronicle afforded most famous figures, Franz dispenses with this well-worn structure early on. Even to those who knew him, Kafka was something of a troubled mystery, and this unknowability guides the movie’s discombobulated structure. FRANZ ★★★ (3/4 stars)Directed by: Agnieszka HollandWritten by: Marek EpsteinStarring: Idan Weiss, Jenovéfa Boková, Peter Kurth, Ivan Trojan, Sandra Korzeniak, Katharina Stark, Sebastian Schwarz, Aaron FrieszRunning time: 127 mins. Franz has little interest in re-creating Kafka’s signature phantasmagoria, since—as a modern museum curator explains—writing about Kafka outweighs his own work by 10 million to one. In the age of vloggers (and, er, Deadpool), this hardly counts as a surreal departure from established visual language, but Holland doesn’t try to re-create Kafka’s style.