“I know a good location for a torture scene,” says an aging movie buff early in The Act of Killing. Like a demonic location scout, this self-professed gangster and notorious death-squad chief leads the way to a site of atrocity haunted by the ghosts of his victims. At once a horrifying history lesson, a riveting portrait of unrepentant evil, and a shocking treatise on the widespread influence and malleable meanings of American cinema, Joshua Oppenheimer's flabbergasting documentary recounts the Indonesian genocide of the mid-1960s, when paramilitary forces obliterated millions of suspected communists, left-wing intellectuals, and other enemies of the fascist state. A handful of perpetrators, never brought to justice, recall the good old days of moviegoing and murder, claiming to have modeled their sadistic behavior on the violent American gangster flicks they watched at local theaters. Hoping to rewrite their corruption-riddled country's past while glorifying their own psychopathy, the men brazenly reenact their heinous crimes in a film-within-the-film, donning costumes and starring in flamboyant productions in which fact and fantasy queasily merge. Oppenheimer and his crew-many of whom must remain anonymous to ensure their safety-have created an astonishing work. As legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog, one of the film's executive producers, says, “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade…It is unprecedented in the history of cinema.”