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An intense look at the trouble life of philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt , who reported for The New Yorker on the war crimes trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann . It deals with her American personal experiences , as in 1950 , Hanna (Barbara Sukowa) became a naturalized citizen of the United States along with her husband Heinrich Blucher (Axel Milberg) . Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and Northwestern University. In the spring of 1959, she became the first woman lecturer at Princeton ; Arendt also taught at the University of Chicago , The New School in Manhattan and Yale University . Furthermore , in the movie appears some flashbacks about her relationship with Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) . Hanna was was a German-American political theorist as well as a prestigious philosopher . Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism.

This is a brooding and thought-provoking biographic drama about the notorious philosopher focusing mainly the Eichman trial . Stands out the wonderful acting by Barbara Sukowa who is terrific in the title role . Support cast is frankly excellent such as Axel Milberg as her husband Heinrich Blucher , Janet McTeer as the writer Mary McCarthy and Julia Jentsch as her helper , the latter also starred another good film about Nazism titled ¨Sophie Scholl¨ . The motion picture was well directed by Margarethe Von Trotta and it belongs a trilogy dealing with Nazism , formed by ¨Roxa Luxemburg¨ also starred by Barbara Sukowa and ¨Rosenstrasse¨or Street of roses .

The picture is based on real events about Hanna Arendt life ; Arendt's first major book was entitled, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism . In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.Arendt was sharply critical of the way the trial was conducted in Israel. She also was critical of the way that some Jewish leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted during the Holocaust. This caused a considerable controversy and even animosity toward Arendt in the Jewish community. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of Jewish mysticism, broke off relations with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Shoah/Holocaust. Due to this lingering criticism, her book has only recently been translated into Hebrew.

The film "Hannah Arendt" depicts an intriguing and contradictory intellectual but avoids examining the political core of the famous controversy it recounts. Arendt stirred a furor with her 1963 writings on the Israeli government's trial in Jerusalem of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. She characterized Eichmann, who had organized the transport of European Jews to the death camps, as a banal bureaucrat rather than a singular monster. She wrote that European Jewish leaders, too, were responsible, by administering submission to the Nazis when even futile resistance and chaos might have allowed more Jews to survive. The public attacks on Arendt are shown. She was pilloried, particularly by Jewish intellectuals, as an unfeeling Nazi sympathizer and self-hating Jew. The New School's move to fire her is also enacted.

But the film, which shows Arendt as shocked to learn that she has hurt the feelings of many Jews, including long-time friends, does not reveal that she had broken with the Zionist leaders in 1942 when they called for a Jewish state rather than the bi-national Palestine she supported. The Zionists opposed measures to rescue Jews from the Nazis other than those that herded them to Palestine. They claimed, however, that their takeover of Palestine was all about saving Jews from a unique evil -- a claim unchallenged by most liberals as well as the Stalinist left. Arendt's analysis hit the Zionists' guilty conscience and undermined the rationale for their nationalist project. The film ignores these crucial political elements, and presents Arendt's strong defender and friend only as novelist "Mary" without disclosing that Mary McCarthy was an anti-Stalinist and anti-Zionist who called Zionism the "Jewish final solution."

Director Margarethe von Trotta's failure to explore this relevant history leaves her film interesting but superficial when it could have been brave and timely. Arendt's famous topic, thoughtless compliance with evildoers in power, needs our attention today more than ever. Fifty years after the "Banality of Evil" controversy, U.S. liberals and progressives are blindly uncritical of a leader who spies on millions and remotely executes foreigners and citizens in the name of national security. A militarily mighty Zionist state is still free to massacre innocents, shielded by this unquestioned U.S. power and the old sacred cow that Israel is the only safe haven for Jews. Arendt might have had some juicy comments about the "banality of filmmaking."

Rita Freed

Although I was not familiar with the name "Hannah Arendt," I was certainly familiar with the phrase "banality of evil" that Arendt coined. However, "banality of evil" is not the phrase she used. The full phrase is "the fearsome, word-and-thought-denying banality of evil." Because, unlike the claims of many accusers who didn't fully understand her, Arendt didn't see a simple bureaucrat in Eichmann during his 1960 trial in Israel. She saw a truly evil man who "spoke like a bureaucrat." Her point being that Eichmann did not speak or seem to think like a genocidal maniac yet he acted like one nevertheless. That is evil cloaked in the banal. This movie revolves around the years of Arendt's life, 1960 to 1963, when she was formulating these ideas and in that, I think the movie probably has it right.

All that said, and these are certainly ideas worth mulling over, this is a film for ideas and for philosophy buffs, not for film buffs. Why do I say this? Because this movie is slow, at least for American audiences. The beginning is confusing. We see a woman in New York but we don't know the date. She speaks German. We see a man get off of a bus heading to "Victoria" in the middle of nowhere. He is promptly kidnapped. We don't know when or where. Eventually, we learn the kidnapped man is Adolph Eichmann who is nabbed by the Mossad in Argentina in 1960. Much of the movie unfolds slowly. This is a film about thinking. It is not about doing much or feeling much. It is an intellectual film.

There's one semi-action scene in the film where a 1950s vehicle corners Arendt on the road where she is walking. Israeli secret agents pour out of the car and threaten Arendt, trying to prevent her from publishing her book about Eichmann. Based on someone knowledgeable, Professor Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College in New York, it appears this scene was invented out of whole cloth to try to give the film at least some suspense. But that's not what this film is about.

It's about thinking and it's about the fearsome, word-and-thought-denying banality of evil and how Hannah Arendt was the first to identify this 20th-century pathology of the human psyche.

Thanks to the Camera Cinema Club in San Jose for showing this film.

Hannah Arendt (2012)

Few movies based on historical figures manage to combine a good sense of character with a first-rate story. Hannah Arendt is an exception. It is directed by Margarethe von Trotta, who had focused on such diverse (and strong) women of history as the nun and mystic Hildegard von Bingen and the leftist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Her latest film is the story of one key episode in the life of Hannah Arendt, the German-American philosopher and political theorist. But Hannah Arendt transcends the bounds of "feminist" filmmaking. It is a work that puts before the viewer key questions about the nature of evil, about acceptance of authority, and about personal responsibility. At the same time it is a fine piece of storytelling.

Arendt was a German Jew who had studied under the noted philosopher Martin Heidegger, and who had a romantic relationship with him that soured when the Nazis came to power and Heidegger publicly supported them. She soon left Germany for France but in 1940 was imprisoned by the Vichy regime in the detention camp in Gurs. Escaping after a few weeks imprisonment, she fled with her husband to the U.S. Throughout and after the war she was active in Jewish causes, including the Zionist movement. In the 1950s she began a career of writing and teaching, which included appointments at such universities as Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago. She became noted for two popular books, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition.

The film deals with one short period in her life, Arendt's reporting on the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the New Yorker magazine, coverage she later turned into a book. In here account she spoke of "the banality of evil," evil done without thinking, because people were "following orders." Arendt's suggestion was that Eichmann was evil not so much because he was a monster, but because he was a mindless bureaucrat. Although she did not disagree with the guilty verdict or Eichmann's hanging, she was critical of the conduct of the trial. Even more controversial was her submission that some Jewish leaders contributed to the magnitude of the Holocaust by their complicity with the authorities. While she recognized the futility of open rebellion, she suggested that less cooperation would at least have saved more lives. Such suggestions, especially coming from a prominent Jew, provoked a firestorm of criticism, and threatened both Arendt's career and lifelong friendships. The movie becomes not just about a single life, but about freedom of expression - the sometimes harsh clash between ideas and fixed opinions - and the great personal costs this can involve.

Still, a movie that focuses so much on one individual requires a superb piece of acting. Director von Trotta gets this from Barbara Sukowa, who played both Hildegard and Rosa Luxemburg in her earlier films. Sukowa brings to the screen not only a supremely intelligent woman, but a very principled and determined one. At the same time she portrays a woman who can be tender and compassionate, and understanding even of her detractors. To blend such widely divergent qualities is no easy task, but Sukowa succeeds in anchoring them securely in the character she plays. Axel Milberg as Heinrich Blücher, Arendt's husband, more reserved, but supportive and protective, is equally credible. Another solid performance comes from Janet McTeer as the political activist, author, and Hannah's steadfast friend, Mary McCarthy. Included also among her inner circle was her secretary, Lotte, played very sympathetically and competently by Julia Jentsch. Two longtime Jewish friends, one in New York, Hans Jonas, and another in Jerusalem (also her former teacher), Kurt Blumenfeld, are very well represented by Ulrich Noethen and Michael Degen. And a very unrepentant and unapologetic Martin Heidegger is played by Klaus Pohl.

In addition to good acting a film that deals with the realm of ideas also requires a finely tuned screenplay and talented direction so that it does not just show pictures of "talking heads." Director von Trotta cooperated with Pam Katz on the script, and what they produced is obviously a labor of love. The situation of ideas against the background of such horrific concrete acts as genocide, and in particular against the showpiece trial of Eichmann, brings them into contact with the very real world. That reality is heightened by the decision not to dramatize Eichmann himself, but to show the genuine article as he appears in the TV footage of the trial. There is such genuine horror there, and yet such obvious banality, as to give Arendt's musings real weight.

In the end the film obliges the viewer to confront the questions Arendt is trying to raise. Are the roots of evil obvious or can they be far more subtle? Where does responsibility begin, and who in a society must take responsibility for the acts of the whole body? The film does not preach, but it certainly raises vital questions. A real gem! Hannah Arendt premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2012. The movie will go into general release on January 17, 2013.

I didn't know an awful lot about philosopher Hannah Arendt before I saw this movie. Now I know a lot more about her, and about the way she thinks. After seeing the film, I have even read some articles about her work.

If that's what director Margarethe von Trotta had in mind when making this film, she succeeded. Her film documents an important chapter in the story of Arendt's life: her articles about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and the ensuing tsunami of negative reactions. The reason for those negative reactions was the way Arendt regarded Eichmann: not as a monster, but as a man 'incapable of thinking', a dimwit who just followed orders. This fitted her theory of 'the banality of evil': the worst kinds of evil are often the result of not thinking for oneself.

Veteran actress Barbara Sukowa portrays Arendt as a difficult and complex woman, who is a brilliant philosopher but also stubborn, arrogant and single-minded. In one scene, we see her lying on a couch, when the phone rings. On the other end of the line is her editor, who faces a deadline and asks if she is making progress with the articles. 'Of course I'm working hard, and it would be nice if I could continue working instead of chatting on the phone', she answers. After that, she returns to the couch, lies down and continues smoking her cigarette.

Sometimes it seems that Arendt is incapable of feeling, just as Eichmann is incapable of thinking. Even when her best friends turn away from her, she continues insulting them by telling them 'she doesn't love the Jewish people'. She means it in a philosophical way - you can't love a people the way you love individuals. But nevertheless, it comes across as cold-hearted and insensitive.

Arendt is clearly an interesting person. But that doesn't make 'Hannah Arendt' an interesting film. From a cinematographic point of view, the movie doesn't have much to offer. It's a rather straightforward account of this episode in Arendt's life. The only thing that adds a little depth to the film are the flashbacks of the romantic affair she had with her teacher, the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger, who sympathized with the Nazis. The film suggests that this affair influenced the way she regarded Nazis such as Eichmann, but doesn't make this explicit. In my view, the film is interesting as a history lesson about this remarkable woman, but not as a great cinematographic experience.

Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt is a film about thinking. Moreover, it's in favour of it. It so values thinking that it offers some elegant speeches and debate, sans computer generated spectaculars.

Barbara Sukowa portrays the German Jewish philosopher during the period she covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel for The New Yorker. The film confronts the controversy Arendt raised when (i) she redefined Eichmann not as a monster but as an ordinary nobody, exemplifying "the banality of evil," (ii) she reported that some Jews collaborated with the Nazis, resulting in more deaths than chaos would have caused, and (iii) she said she loves her friends but not any "people," in this case, the Jews. On all three counts she was condemned for abandoning her people. Today, at a remove from the heat of that moment, she was clearly correct on all counts. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.

Not loving the Jews was not being anti-Semitic but refusing to emotionalize her consideration of the issues. Arendt was opposed to the blanket love of any group of people, not based on personal engagement, because such nationalist or other group identification precluded the thoughtful consideration of any issues around them. She most valued a rational, thoughtful approach that was not prejudged or proscribed by any -ism or convention. As for some Jews' collaboration, she simply reported facts that arose at the trial. (Indeed, Rudolf van den Berg's new film Suskind details precisely that collaboration.) Nor was that observation anti-Semitic, for the possibly well-intentioned collaboration in the face of horrid danger is a plausible response among any people. Arendt was pilloried for facing the facts and for rejecting myths. That's what historians are required to do and apparently what philosophers periodically have to remind them to do.

Folks, this is what Philosophy is all about: taking a stand which is not always popular and being able to justify it for the ages. Hannah Arendt is only in this century beginning to receive her due as the most perspicuous political philosopher of the 20th century. After all, it was Ms Arendt who first observed that post-Hiroshima, a conventional war could never again be fought and won. But rather, all pre-emptive invasions who devolve into occupations - that rather than full-scale war or revolutions - the world would sink increasingly into a mire of entropic violence. Her controversial thesis in Eichmann In Jerusalem - yet another masterpiece of at least five in her canon, is that mass atrocities are not committed by idiosyncratic madmen who erect vast engines of evil in which the followers (citizens of the state) serve as the 'cogs' – but rather the architectonic of evil consists in the actions of rather ordinary people who for various reasons and rationalizations refuse to think about the ramifications of what they're doing. I mention this point because I've studied Ms Arendt's work for over three decades, lived in Greenwich Village when she was teaching at the New School, and when I saw the film premiere at the Santa Barbara Film Festival this past January – I felt that most of the scant audience did not get the point any more than her contemporaries. The film-making is excellent. To dramatize philosophic ideas is challenge in itself. Von Trotta, in the old European style, makes her films with a regular group of actors, and, while the performances were effective throughout, in real life, Hannah Arendt was not nearly so physically engaging and Mary McCarthy quite a bit more – which, I believe had something to do with the development their respective moral characters. All in all, a great, not merely a good, film – and one of the few worth seeing thus far this year – unless, of course, the attributes of fast and furious 6 or iron man 3 overwhelm.

Hanna Arendt is a biopic of the homonymous German philosopher focusing on her coverage of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the outrage that her articles on it ensued.

As a historical document, the movie is gripping and mostly clear (though some lines of the discussions of her with her friends are a bit unclear) to laymen. I, for one, had never heard of Arendt and the 'banality of evil' before, but I believe that now I'd be able to talk about her thoughts with making a fool out of myself. For that, I thank the film.

Though, on a movie-making viewpoint, it is a letdown. The flow of the film is pretty odd, with leaps in time and space (eg. suddenly she is in Israel), and the efforts to use transition scenes are pretty untimely. The dialogs aren't the best either, with strange remarks here and there, and philosophic remarks not everyone could grasp.

Hannah Arendt is much more of a history and philosophy class, than a great movie. Though, it deserves a bit of appreciation for successfully exposing a great woman's thoughts to a new generation.

Hannah Arendt (2012) is a movie co-written and directed by the outstanding German director Margarethe von Trotta.

The film stars Barbara Sukowa as Arendt, who was one of he leading intellectual thinkers of the 20th Century. Arendt's history reads more like fiction than non-fiction. As discussed in the movie, she studied in Germany under the great philosopher Heidegger, was imprisoned in a Nazi internment camp in France, from which she escaped, came to the U.S., and taught at some of the finest universities in our country.

The movie concentrates on the furor that arose after Arendt wrote about the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. (These articles were later published as a book.) Arendt brought forth her theory of the banality of evil in these articles. Her point was that an evil person like Eichmann was not a monster, but rather a person who has renounced his ability to think, and therefore has renounced his status as a human being.

Arendt believed that Jews who accepted a modicum of authority from the Germans contributed to the Holocaust, because without the Jewish leaders to maintain order, there would have been more chaos and less killing of Jews.

This latter belief made people furious, because it suggested that the Jews were partially responsible for their own fate. This is hard enough to hear now. You can imagine how it was received in 1961, less than 20 years after the Holocaust.

One weakness of the film is that the script suggests that "everyone" was talking about Arendt's writing. Then, as now, the intellectuals of the Upper West Side of Manhattan did not represent a true sample of the U.S. population. Many people were aware of the Eichmann trial, but Arendt's writings passed unnoticed by most people.

Another weakness is that characters in Arendt's life are introduced once, and then never again. If you miss the names the first time, you'll just have to live without knowing who was whom. That's not so bad, because you can accept Barbara Sukowa as Arendt. Everyone else in the film revolves around her.

If you're interested in the Holocaust and in 20th Century philosophy, the film is a must. Even if those topics aren't important to you, the movie is compelling as a study in human behavior and human interactions. We saw the film at the Rochester Jewish Community Center as part of terrific Rochester Jewish Film Festival. If it's available on DVD or at another festival, I recommend that you see it.

Ms. von Trotta's film portrays Hannah Arendt at the time in her life when she wrote one of her most influential books, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, and the furor that came after its publication in 1963. There were two points presented in the New Yorker magazine article that she wrote, compiled shortly thereafter and published as a 300-plus-page book, which were considered the source of the grief among the Jewish community: First is her disdain in calling a Eichmann a "monster" and claims that that would only feed his illusions of superiority born out of his want to escape the humdrum existence of being regarded as just a mere cog in the Nazi killing machine with no motives or intentions or trace of mental illness whatsoever, somebody who is just following orders. Second is her view that the Jewish leaders have made decisions which endangered the Jewish people even more and the number of people that have perished in the Shoah would not have been as overwhelmingly immense if they were unorganized. It is the methodical and critical stance in detailing her observations of the Eichmann trial, that made her a much reviled figure in the Jewish community whose wounds and traumas brought on by WWII were still fresh, most of whom are either haven't even read the articles themselves or too much upset to continue reading it.

It is Arendt's relationship with her close family and friends that makes most of the film, shows a more sensitive and sentimental side to a personality that has acquired quite steely reputation. The prominent men in her life that includes her affectionate husband, Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), her earnest friend, Kurt Blumenfeld (Kurt Blumenfeld), her host in Israel when she covered Eichmann's trial, and her former lover/mentor and known Nazi sympathizer, Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl), whose memories she is seen reminiscing with utmost restraint. Her female confidants includes her gregarious friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) and her trustworthy secretary Lotte Köhler (Julia Jentsch).

Barbara Sukowa's compelling take as the eponymous title character conveys the staedfastness that complements and coalesces well with the adept performances of the supporting and minor characters. The biopic's straightforward manner in presenting a life-snapshot of a well-known figure, the director's hand, the way the story was told, the musical score, or the original footage from the 1961 Eichmann trial doesn't take much attention away from the audience of their presence gives Ms. Sukowa's refined performance to shine through. Arendt's character is seen for the most part in this film to be puffing a cigarette, even at times where she is lying on a couch with eyes closed, contemplating in silence, brooding scenes which are not at all that long-winded, more of an enigma, actually.

My rating: A-minus.

With a new director, new producer, new cinematographer, new editor, new script and new lead actress, this might be a fine movie. I fear the world is filled with those who vaunt this dreary film because they espouse what Arendt had to say. This is a movie, and needs to be meritorious on things one likes movies for...such as being well-directed, well-acted, with a sense of ensemble, a good script, non-formulaic execution of the story. Oh, and please no Dogma lighting! Jews will wrongly find common cause with me for hating this movie because they despised Arendt. If you want to understand Arendt, read "The Banality of Evil." Nothing is to be learned or felt from this dreary procession of a hamfisted film. More's the pity as there is a story worth telling.

Every once in a while you'll see a really good performance that's prevented from being great by the film around it. That's the case with Barbara Sukowa as the title character in "Hannah Arendt," a dramatization of a controversial episode in the writer and philosopher's life when she was ostracized for writing a piece in "The New Yorker" about the trials of Eichmann that Jews felt sympathized too much with the Nazi cause.

The tone of the film is overly righteous and leaves its audience no room to come to a conclusion on its own. In the world of the film, Hannah is a hero of free speech and free thinking, while those who are offended by her are portrayed as narrow-minded, rat-faced villains. The entire film has a feeling of artifice that it can't overcome -- the actors move around the set like actors in a play, reciting obviously scripted lines in strange, haughty tones, their noses literally in the air. Even Janet McTeer, an actress who I love, seems ill at ease with the material she's given.

Only the performance of Sukowa makes this film worth watching, even if the primary feeling watching her is how much better her performance could have been if the movie itself was better. One moment and one moment only, a rousing monologue she delivers during the film's finale, in which she defends her point of view to a room full of students and faculty members, provides a glimpse of the powerful movie "Hannah Arendt" could have been.

Grade: B-

This is a fascinating look at Hanna Arendt, a German-American philosopher who in 1961 reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker. A huge controversy erupted.

Arendt left Germany in 1933 for France, but when Germany invaded France, she found herself in a detention camp. When the film begins, she is a happily married woman with friends such as the writer Mary McCarthy, and she is a professor at, among other places, the New School in New York City.

Hanna is very excited about covering the trial, but her husband, Heinrich, is afraid it will take her back to those dark days.

While observing Eichmann, Arendt is struck by the fact that he was an ordinary man with nothing special about him. This causes her to think about the nature of evil itself.

She decides that he's not a monster but a person who suppressed his conscience in order to be obedient to the Nazis. She thus created the concept of the "banality of evil."

She believed also that some Jewish leaders at the time had fallen into this trap and unwittingly participated in the Holocaust. Her critics failed to understand her meaning.

In some camps, her New Yorker articles were not well received, as she was seen as a heartless turncoat who blamed the victims. Hanna has to defend her ideas, and the price she pays for them is high.

Barbara Sukowa does a magnificent job as Arendt, showing the woman's brilliance, courage, affection for friends and family, and hurt when some people she loved turned against her.

It's surprising that she was met with as much disdain as she was -- but Arendt did not believe in blind adoration of any group. She took people on an individual basis.

As far as the banality of evil, evil has always had the ordinary face of people sitting back and doing what they're told. Or, as Martin Luther King said, doing nothing.

I'm sure many of us have experienced this in the workplace -- I know I did. It's then that you realize the true nature of most people. Everyone can say they have ethics - but do they have ethnics when they stand to lose something?

Beautifully directed by Margarethe von Trotta, who also co-wrote the screenplay. A difficult subject made clear, a complicated woman understandable -- no small feat. A thought-provoking film.

Other reviewers have questioned the historical accuracy of Margarethe von Trotta's portrayal of Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) and her opinion of the Jewish leaders as expressed in her NEW YORKER articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961.

As a piece of film-making, however, HANNAH ARENDT grabs the attention and does not let go throughout its 113-minute running- time. As portrayed by Sukowa, Arendt comes across as a forthright person, not frightened of expressing her opinions and responding to any intellectual challenges from close friends such as Kurt Blumenfeld (Michael Degen). Yet beneath that tough surface lurks a profoundly disillusioned person, as she discovers to her cost that her great teacher and mentor Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) does not practice what he preaches. Although insistent on reinforcing the distinction between "reason" and "passion," Heidegger takes the "passionate" decision to associate himself with the Nazi party, and thereby embraces their totalitarian values. Like Eichmnann himself, he chooses not to "think" but to commit himself to an ideology that actively discourages individual thought.

The sense of shock and disillusion Arendt experiences inevitably colors her view of the Eichmann trial. Director von Trotta includes several close-ups of her sitting in the press-room listening to the testimony of Eichmann, his accusers and the witnesses, a quizzical expression on her face, as if she cannot quite make sense of what she hears. She cannot condemn Eichmann, because he has simply followed Heidegger's course of action.

Once the articles have been published, Arendt experiences an almost unprecedented campaign of vilification. Although she is given a climactic scene where she defends herself in front of her students (and her accusers within the university faculty), we get the sense that she is only doing so on the basis of abstractions; her personal feelings are somehow disengaged. She is far more affected when her one-time close friend Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen) vows never to talk to her again on account of her views. Philosophers might be able to make sense of the world, but they often neglect human relations.

Consequently our view of Arendt, as portrayed in this film, is profoundly ambivalent. While empathizing with her views about the banality of evil, which reduces people to automata as they claim they were only carrying out orders, even while being involved in atrocities, Arendt herself comes across as rather myopic, so preoccupied with her ideas that she has little or no clue about how they might affect those closest to her. It's a wonder, therefore, that Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) chooses to stick with her through the worst of circumstances.

Ingeniously combining archive footage of the Eichmann trial with color re-enactments of what happened during that period, HANNAH ARENDT is a thought-provoking piece, even if we find it difficult to identify with the central character.

This is a marvelous movie! Really made me consider the brilliant original thinking of this woman, and I was surprised by the hysterical opposition to what she in her own honesty reported.

Very well acted and directed, a tension ran through the entire movie, making one feel that one was on the edges of an important discovery about the fundamental nature of humanity. And the movie did not disappoint.

One week after seeing the film, the thought lingers: We live in a world of lies and deception, because by and large we are afraid of the truth. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but most of us prefer to live our lives in the dark shadows of our ideologies rather than step into the searing light: that good and evil resides in each of us, and that each of us is capable of the most unspeakable evils under the right conditions. All it takes is for us to stop thinking and just blindly "do our duty" and follow orders, as Adolph Eichmann did.

Brilliant movie!

This film helped me to forget that it was a film. Subtle, intelligent but mostly telling a story imperative to the 21st century. By making links throughout Arendt's personal life and development as not only one of 20th century's most brilliant thinkers and philosophers but a sentient passionate and moral woman, juxtaposed with her work—and the aftermath of—her New Yorker articles on the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt, without making such a projection, articulates what this current era of humanity suffers from most: "The banality of evil". The film brings this point into sharp focus without as much saying this is what we need, but the timeliness of it is most certainly intentional.

This film also beautifully, and again subtly, captures the state-of-mind of an era: One of calcified righteousness among others who cherished clarity of mind, goodness and intelligence, and a style of humor and affection from which those things flowed freely.

See the film to understand exactly what all this means and why Arendt's topic of the "banality of evil" is so important for today's crises facing humanity.

What is the role of an intellectual in an increasingly anti-intellectual world? In a world of uncontrolled and under-analyzed displays of emotion, room for an intellectual, even more so for a political philosopher, is getting smaller and smaller. Hannah Arendt's thesis about banality of evil stirred the world. Perhaps because it is more terrifying to see the potential for evil in benign looking individuals than in larger than life monsters. It seems almost that we are more comfortable with childhood ogres that are hiding under our beds. If evil could be anywhere or present in anybody, can we ever be safe? Brilliant film-making, a taught provoking masterpiece in unthinkable times.

Banal dialogue in a movie is never a desirable quantity but in one whose subject is a brilliant thinker and writer it is especially unwelcome. Give it a C.

If you do not know who Hannah Arendt was, then watching this film is essentially a waste of time. We ordered the DVD by accident, and we found it a tough film to sit through.

Barbara Sukowa makes a valiant effort to bring Hannah to life. Since I do not know what Hannah was really like, I only had this performance to rely on.

In brief, Hanna was a historian, writer and professor. She had been tasked by The New Yorker magazine with covering the trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann. Her subsequent writings about this trial are the main thrust of this film.

That said, one must really have a fairly strong grasp on these things because without them, the movie is basically a lot of scenes of people putting on and taking off their eyeglasses, smoking non-stop and talking at each other with various degrees of loudness.

The movie is well made and obviously had a substantial budget, considering its subject matter. Even so, I felt we were constantly being dragged back and forth between Israel and New York City, with homes, campuses and bus rides in between.

This film is a based on the life of the title character, a Jewish German who escaped the Holocaust and became a renowned political theorist in the United States. The film takes place in the early 1960s when Arendt was assigned by the New Yorker magazine to cover the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. Her articles caused great controversy.

Often photographed in dark tones, this film has that "exotic European" feel to it in a good way. It's difficult to know whether the film sides with Arendt or her detractors which, of course, is a plus. In this way, the movie would be a great lead-in for much philosophical discussion following the movie.

With so much intellectual and philosophical discussion, the film exhausts the mind occasionally but only rarely. With the great German actress Barbara Sukowa in the title role, the film shines even more, whether Sukowa is expressing herself in German or in English. Her passionate defense of her writing in a scene near the end is a great movie moment.