The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) Critic Reviews

A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.Read the full review

A long but powerful true-life drama of 1970s German terrorists features masterful storytelling and bravura performances.Read the full review

Seems propelled by a doomed sense of inevitability and is all the more gripping for it.Read the full review

Edel'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.Read the full review

A fascinating hybrid of a film. Even though its purpose couldn't be more serious, its style could hardly be more pulp.Read the full review

For a thoroughly fascinating, true glimpse into the horrors that vanity and self-delusion can wreak, take some time to see The Baader Meinhof Complex.Read the full review

Swift, 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.Read the full review

The film would have benefitted by being less encompassing and focusing on a more limited number of emblematic characters -- Meinhof and Herold, for starters.Read the full review

For 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.Read the full review