Arts & Culture

Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation

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By LEV AKABAS

Sometimes, in an art museum, you’ll come to a beautiful but conventional painting, perhaps a portrait or a still life. You’ll stand in front of it for a minute, marveling at the brushstrokes that bring it to life, but by the time you leave the museum, you won’t remember much about the piece. A work like Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, for example, which depicts the destruction caused by war in a unique and thought-provoking way, will stick with you much more than paintings that simply portray their subjects accurately. Netflix original, Beasts of No Nation, based on a novel of the same name, is a devastating portrayal of child warfare. The film follows a young boy, Agu (Abraham Attah), who escapes into the jungle when a violent civil war reaches his home village in an unnamed African country.