Kafka

No one can accuse director Steven Soderbergh of playing it safe. After his success with SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE he could have done anything. But what he chose was KAFKA, a horror-fantasy thriller, leavened with sharp wit, and derived from the life and works of author Franz Kafka.

Kafka (Jeremy Irons) is a clerk for an insurance company in a bleak Eastern European city sometime around the turn of the century. On the side, of course, he writes stories about people turning into insects and penal colonies where surgical needles carve the statute you have violated into the flesh on your back. Yet he still seems the sanest person in his weird world of petty office t...