The Guardian by Xan Brooks

The film is at its most grimly compelling when it puts her on stage, pinned down by her accusers and fielding questions with a mix of wary contempt and sudden explosions of incandescent rage.

The Times by Kevin Maher

It’s not often that films get better on a second viewing, but this dense, challenging and intellectually rigorous documentary about “Hitler’s favourite film-maker” Leni Riefenstahl is one of those exceptions.

The Daily Beast by Barry Levitt

Riefenstahl is a crushing exposé, and its most impressive trick is peeling back the layers of a very private woman to show a petulant child who can’t believe people haven’t gotten over the atrocities she willingly helped create.

The Film Stage by Dan Mecca

The majority of the film is driven by Riefenstahl’s own voice from various recordings. She often comes across as charming and intelligent. That is, of course, what makes her decades of denials and lies all the more disturbing.

Screen Daily by Fionnuala Halligan

With fresh access to her personal, self-serving and -aggrandising archives, Veiel lets Riefenstahl speak unedited: she puts a lot of issues to rest through her own lies, evasions and unrelentingly difficult personality.

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

It answers Riefenstahl’s carefully chosen narrative, a fable of disillusioned purity, with an equally forensic counternarrative exposing her childlike narcissism about the impact of her talent. More disquietingly, she reveals a selective ignorance regarding the circumstances that brought her power and recognition.

Wall Street Journal by Zachary Barnes

The portrait that emerges is that of a fanatical protector of her public image, a movie star turned director for whom the camera was a miraculous and endlessly manipulable tool, no matter which side of it she was on.

RogerEbert.com by Robert Daniels

By making a film that says there is no complicated legacy to Riefenstahl, Veiel’s uncomplicated approach, supported by Riefenstahl’s own words, is strongly rendered into a direct, inarguable slashing of Riefenstahl’s importance.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Andres Veiel’s sombre documentary tells the gripping, incrementally nauseating story of Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, the brilliant and pioneering German film-maker of the 20th century who isn’t getting her name on a Girls on Tops T-shirt any time soon.

The Film Verdict by Deborah Young

Leni Riefenstahl and her controversial legacy are examined in fascinating depth in the new German doc 'Riefenstahl' by Andres Veiel.

The Irish Times by Donald Clarke

Veiel structures his film with grace and guile.

IndieWire by Christian Blauvelt

Veiel and Maischberger build a compelling case that she was in fact a Nazi, right up until the end of her life.

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

It’s a portrait that’s really a meditation on Riefenstahl — her life, her art, the question of her guilt. And one of the things it does is to remind you of what a singularly provocative and insidious and mysterious figure she was.

The Hollywood Reporter by Daniel Fienberg

I got bogged down frequently in the familiarity and intentional messiness of the story that Veiel and producer Sandra Maischberger chose to tell, while at the same time wondering what sense a wholly unaware viewer would be able to make of this woman and the long shadow she still casts.