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Germany · 2015
Rated R · 1h 45m
Director Lars Kraume
Starring Burghart Klaußner, Ronald Zehrfeld, Sebastian Blomberg, Jörg Schüttauf
Genre History, Drama
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Set in 1957, Attorney General Fritz Bauer, in the midst of recovering from an alleged suicide attempt, discovers files missing from his office. Allying with a young lawyer, Bauer wants to bring Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Germany for a trial. Realizing this is difficult, he considers enlisting the help of Israeli intelligence.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
Though blessed with a spectacular true story and character to work from, director and co-screenwriter Lars Kraume...fails to breathe much life into the stuffy, overly complex enumeration of the historical facts.
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
Lars Kraume's tinkering with the historical record would be more welcome were he also shifting away from the standard biopic template.
RogerEbert.com by Godfrey Cheshire
Kraume’s mounting of this tale, while capable enough, is also rather staid and conventional.
The New York Times by Ken Jaworowski
Mr. Kraume captures the glances and motions that lay bare a character’s thoughts. He’s fond of the gruff and curmudgeonly Bauer, yet sentimentality is scarce while the double-crossings are surprising and the dry humor is welcome.
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Energizing the entire film, in fact powering us past its more conventional aspects, is the compelling performance of veteran German actor Burghart Klaussner, who captures Bauer’s firebrand intensity exactly.
The pacing is methodical but breakthroughs in the case and anxious moments where all is feared lost generate real tension.
The Playlist by Oktay Ege Kozak
The People vs Fritz Bauer successfully uses the moral importance of its themes and the strength of its performances in order to build a riveting procedural that efficiently covers for its lack of visual pizzazz.
Though relatively conservative in its approach, Lars Kraume’s teleplay-style treatment of a still-touchy subject has the nerve to name names.
Village Voice by Serena Donadoni
By focusing on his subject's unwavering moral certainty, Kraume denies his ethical complexity and diminishes the difficulties of his challenging stance to educate the society that wanted him dead.
Screen International by Wendy Ide
A solid, persuasively-acted account of the real-life mission to bring a Nazi war criminal to justice.
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