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Hannah Arendt

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Germany, Luxembourg, France · 2012
1h 53m
Director Margarethe von Trotta
Starring Barbara Sukowa, Axel Milberg, Janet McTeer, Julia Jentsch
Genre Drama

After she attends the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, German-Jewish émigré Hannah Arendt dares to write about the Holocaust in terms no one has ever heard before: “the banality of evil.” Her work provokes attacks from friends and foes, as she struggles to suppress her own painful associations with the past.

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What are critics saying?

100

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Hannah Arendt conveys the glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought.... The movie turns ideas into the best kind of entertainment.

63

Slant Magazine by Chuck Bowen

The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.

80

The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

Von Trotta seems to borrow some of her subject’s haughty disdain for compromise in a serviceable script that does the job of telling us who Hannah Arendt was like a good pair of solid, gray walking shoes; there’s nothing fancy or modern to distract from the portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the century.

75

Portland Oregonian by Marc Mohan

A watchable, even suspenseful portrait of a woman who spends most of the film smoking cigarettes, sitting at typewriters or sparring at dinner parties.

60

Time Out by Michael Atkinson

A movie of one billion cigarettes, Hannah Arendt is about moral reason, not personality. It could do worse than lead you straight to the woman’s books.

67

The A.V. Club by Nick Schager

Opting to leave somewhat open the question of whether its subject was a traitor to her Jewish people or a conscientious scholar determined to conduct rational analysis free of public and peer pressure, it remains a mildly intriguing drama of the often unavoidable and contentious intersection of intellectual analysis and personal prejudices.

75

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Rick Groen

En route, despite some clumsy exposition and the reduction of heavyweights like Mary McCarthy and William Shawn to fifth-business caricatures, the film does manage one impressive intellectual achievement of its own: rescuing that “banality of evil” phrase from the banal cliché it’s become and, by providing the full and daring context, giving it real meaning again.

50

Variety by Robert Koehler

Von Trotta’s Arendt biopic feels like a movie stuck in another era, stolid and rote, more of an outline for a dramatic treatment than the real thing.

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