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100An explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama about the radical group that terrorized Germany for nearly 30 years.
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91It leaves us with a question that may be unanswerable: How does one extinguish terrorism when its causes are myriad?
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A long but powerful true-life drama of 1970s German terrorists features masterful storytelling and bravura performances.
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90A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.
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89The end result is an electrifying, morally complex story of the evil that men (and women) do in the name of the greater good.
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88The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.
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88Has been criticized as endorsing or condoning violence, but that assessment is unfair and inaccurate. If terrorism is to be eliminated, it must be understood, not oversimplified.
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80Fascinating history, very good movie -- but demanding, and its lack of easy answers will frustrate some. Lessons about 21st century terrorism are implicit, but not overly stressed.
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80A fascinating hybrid of a film. Even though its purpose couldn't be more serious, its style could hardly be more pulp.
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80Edel's clear-eyed and exhaustively researched account is unique in its refusal to either romanticize or villainize the terrorists. It's a study in the seductive appeal, and inevitable failure, of the attempt to bomb one's way to a better world.
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80Seems propelled by a doomed sense of inevitability and is all the more gripping for it.
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80I have seen The Baader Meinhof Complex three or four times now, and, despite exasperation with its fissile form, I find it impossible not to be plunged afresh into this engulfing age of European anxiety.
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75If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.
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75For a thoroughly fascinating, true glimpse into the horrors that vanity and self-delusion can wreak, take some time to see The Baader Meinhof Complex.
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75Swift, brutal, lurid, often overheated, and occasionally comical, but it’s also a serious, well acted, and unromantic exploration of the rise and demise of a terrorist gang whose radicalism ultimately reached beyond the young men and women who set it in motion.
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75The film is gummed up by Bruno Ganz as an intelligence officer who wants not only to capture the bad guys but to understand them -- and to explain them, hand-wringingly, endlessly.
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70This is no art film, but Edel and Eichinger supply an action-packed, reasonably coherent account of youthful rock 'n' roll idealism run amok, and how it produced the craziest phenomenon of the crazy European far left.
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70The movie is a sweeping, hectic docudrama that would have been immeasurably helped by the use of informational intertitles.
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63The film would have benefitted by being less encompassing and focusing on a more limited number of emblematic characters -- Meinhof and Herold, for starters.
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58For two and a half hours, Edel lays out the bombings, kidnappings, and murders committed by the Baader-Meinhof group, which mutated into the RAF. He catches the violently delusional self-righteousness of their antifascist fervor, but as individuals these cultish guerrillas remain opaque.
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50An explosive performance by Johanna Wokalek gives some relief to an otherwise long and humdrum series of characters.
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40This isn’t revisionist history; it’s a key moment in political radicalism reduced to an empty pop-cultural posture.