It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

This is a most remarkable film about an article written by a most remarkable philosopher. If von Trotta's film is at all reminiscent of any other film, I'll put my money on Miller's "Capote" (with Philip Seymor Hoffman), about another 60s writer who approached an untouchable subject in a controversial way. But there the analogy stops. Where the earlier film exhibited Capote as preying on his death-row murderers for his own personal gain, von Trotta's and Sukowa's Arendt jeopardizes her academic esteem with her account of the Jerusalem trial of the indefensible Nazi criminal Adolf Eichman. The world in general and Ben Gurion's Israel in particular wish merely to gloat at the downfall of a monster, but Arendt refuses to oblige. In Eichman, she sees a depressingly ordinary man caught up in the atrocities of the Third Reich; a man who was not part of Hitler's anti-Semitic craze but was simply doing his duty by the corrupt laws of a monstrous regime. Stating that "If (Eichman) had not been found guilty before he appeared in Jerusalem, the Israelis would never have dared, or wanted, to kidnap him in formal violation of Argentine law," Arendt exposes the hypocrisy of the Jerusalem show trial and of a world that used Eichman as a scapegoat whose execution would exempt the rest of the world from blame. Arendt ends the article she was commissioned to write for "the New Yorker" with her own rephrasing of the Jerusalem verdict of Eichman: "Just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations… we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang." All hell breaks loose after the publication, but when asked if she would have written the article if she had known what would ensue, Arendt says yes. Her integrity instructed her. However, the film delves deeper than this, and in different directions, too, which leaves the final verdict up to us. On one hand, we clearly see Arendt's point justified when Israeli government officials inform her that her work will be banned in Israel and she retorts, "You forbid books and you speak of decency?" But, on the other hand, the film gingerly touches upon Arendt's past affair with Nazi sympathizer Heidegger and makes us wonder whether this may somehow have influenced her article, and moreover, we are repeatedly told, by several characters in the film, that she is obstinate and willful to a fault. The film depicts a philosopher at a crucial turning-point in her life, and it leaves her when she is deserted by all her former friends in the Jewish community. The film must be seen at least twice, I think, before it can be determined whether our protagonist is eventually triumphant or defeated.

Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) is a writer philosopher professor working in NYC. It's 1960. Nazi Adolf Eichmann has just been captured and is to stand trial in Israel. Arendt, who left Germany in 1933 and was held in a french detention camp, offers to go to cover the trial for the New Yorker. She finds Eichmann to be a nobody, and a bureaucrat. She also finds the trial to be not about Eichmann but a much more general indictment of the Third Reich. Her husband has health problems. She is being pushed by the publisher. She writes a controversial article explaining Eichmann's evil intent as simply unable to think and describes the Jewish leadership who cooperated with the Nazis one way or another. It's met with anger and even death threats. She answers her critics with a lecture to her students in which she describes the banality of evil.It's a fascinating political debate and a slice of history. It takes this story to harsh out some ideas about the nature evil. Sukowa gives this person a powerful presence. However I don't think it digs into her personality deep enough. Where does she get her sensibilities? What was her childhood like? What was her life in Europe like? I like the philosophy debate but I want more of her personal story.

Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat who organised the transport of Jews to concentration camps during Hitler's reign in Germany. If the anti-semites who peddle all that Holocaust denial nonsense had enough intellectual curiosity to read Hannah Arendt's book about his 1960-2 trial in Israel, they would discover a far more potent means of spreading their racial hatred. Arendt describes the way in which Eichmann, a mediocrity rather than a monster, used his negotiating skills to convince the Jewish organisations that they could "save" a certain number of Jews by assisting in the "deportation" of othersI watched the unfolding of Margarethe von Trotta's film with something akin to disbelief. I went away and read the book version of Arendt's series of articles for the New Yorker magazine on the trial of Eichmann in Israel in 1960-62. …(Penguin Edition 2005) page 58 The Councils of Jewish Elders were informed by Eichmann… of how many Jews were needed to fill each train and they made out the list of deportees… The few who tried to hide or to escape were rounded up by a special Jewish police forcepage 60 Without Jewish help in administrative and police work…there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpowerpage 61 to a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole story page 62 … we can still sense how they enjoyed their new power – the Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower … Jewish officials felt like Captains "whose ships were about to sink and who succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part of the precious cargo" … In order not to leave the selection to blind fate, truly holy principles were needed as the guiding force of the weak human hand which puts down on paper the name of the unknown person and with this decides his life or death. And who did these holy principles single out for salvation? Those who have worked all their lives for the community i.e. The functionaries and the most prominent Jews (through page 65, 70-71 and 80-83)…The film then depicts the way in which the Jews with whom Arendt had associated in America before writing those articles virtually excommunicated her. Nothing new about that. Read chapters 20 and 29 of the Jewish prophet Jeremiah (628-587 B.C.E.), who faced 'criticism' for daring to tell his countrymen they were to be exiled in Babylon for seventy years. In fact it was Jeremiah who came up with the notion of 'assimilation'. That's in chapter 29 of his prophecies too…Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.  Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.The whole assimilationist trend has been attributed to the eighteenth century philosopher and wandering Jew, Moses Mendelssohn by, among others, Simon Schama in his 2013 BBC television series "The Story of the Jews". As that series pointed out, Theodor Herzl contested the assimilationist idea in his 1895 book, "Der Judenstaat" ("The Jewish State") which launched the Zionist movement, whose activities culminated in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Arendt makes the astounding disclosure that it was one of the few books Eichmann ever read. He not only read it. It became the foundation of his 'idealistic' view that Jewish feet should stand on Jewish, not German, soil. Everything that he accomplished was directed toward that purpose.But maybe there is an even more shocking idea inherent in the film's narrative than that.I had heard the striking phrase, 'the banality of evil' before I had heard of Arendt. She uses it in her paragraph describing the hanging death of Eichmann at the hands of Israeli officials. But like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, evil has a way of disguising its banality. If we can define Nazism as evil, was it something in the Nazi tendencies of her teacher and lover, Martine Heidegger, that attracted her to him? (If the depiction of Heidegger in the film by Klaus Pohl is accurate, it was certainly not his looks). There is the scene in which she and her female confidante, Mary McCarthy, talk about 'the love of her life" over a game of billiards. She denies it was Martin HeideggerBut then I was surprised when I heard the critics raving about the performance of Barbara Sukowa in the lead role. To me, watching the film, I found her performance in her scenes of domestic interaction with her husband rather forced. It brought to mind those rather overstated intimations of affection of people who seem to be trying to convince themselves that feel more strongly for their partner than their hearts' tell them that they do. Her performance seemed to be 'artificial'.Maybe Mary McCarthy was right. Maybe it all gets back to that idea of Chris Hedges, quoted as a preface to Kathryn Bigelow's 2008 film, "The Hurt Locker" to the effect that "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning". Maybe the serpent, the Shining One, in the Garden of Eden had an attractiveness that transcended mere banality. Maybe it was something about the evil in Heidegger that made him the love of Arendt's life

German screenwriter, film professor, producer and director Margarethe Von Trotta's thirteenth feature film which she co-wrote with American screenwriter Pamela Katz, is inspired by a biography from 1982 by American author and psychotherapist Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1946-2011) and real events in the life of a 20th century German-Jewish political theorist. It premiered in the Special Presentations section at the 37th Toronto International Film Festival in 2012, was screened in the German Cinema section at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival in 2013, was shot on location in America, Israel and Luxembourg and is a Germany-Luxembourg-France co-production which was produced by producers Johannes Rexin and Bettina Brokemper. It tells the story about a 54-year-old emigrant and thinker named Hannah Arendt who lives in an apartment in New York City, USA with her husband and professor in philosophy named Heinrich Blücher. In 1960, SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann who had been helped by the Roman Catholic Church to escape from Austria to Argentina is captured and kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Argentina by Mossad agents and taken to Jerusalem, Israel where he is to be convicted for crimes against humanity. In the summer of June in 1961 whilst the world is awaiting the upcoming trial which is to be broadcasted on Israeli television, Hannah is given the demanding assignment of covering the event by American journalist William Shawn at The New Yorker. Distinctly and precisely directed by German filmmaker Margarethe Von Trotta, this finely paced and somewhat fictional, though probably as truthful as possible, tale which is narrated from multiple viewpoints though mostly from the main character's point of view, draws a conscientious and revering portrayal of the adversity a University teacher and former Zionist is faced with after writing a ten-page essay about a war criminal called Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" which becomes very controversial, and how her interpretation of this widely discussed historical event and its subject matters affected her friendship with a German-Jewish philosopher named Hans Jonas whom she studied with at the University of Marburg, Germany in the 1920s and a German-Jewish Zionist leader named Kurt Blumenfeld whom she worked with in Germany in the early 1930s. While notable for its distinct and atmospheric milieu depictions, reverent and distinguishable cinematography by French cinematographer and director Caroline Champetier, production design by production designer Volker Schaefer, costume design by costume designer Frauke Firl, make-up by make-up artist Astrid Weber and use of colors and light, this character-driven and dialog-driven story about the importance of independent thinking, the historical consequences of totalitarianism and the origins of evil where the narrative is driven by the protagonist's consistent contemplation and an incisively intellectual and profoundly humane woman from Hanover, Germany is wrongfully accused of having defended one of the "many" participants of the extermination of Jews whom she regarded as a mediocre nobody and bureaucrat who was incapable of thinking due to his unconditional obedience to his leader and of blaming the Jewish people for what they were subjected to by the Nazis during the Second World War, depicts a refined and eloquent study of character and contains a timely score by composer André Mergenthaler. This revising, informative, quietly romantic, at times humorous and ingeniously and virtuously anti-totalitarian character piece which is set in Germany, Israel and America in the 1920s, 1950s and early 1960s, which reconstructs poignant events in Hanna Arendt's life and where a prominent author who had a romance with one of her most significant teachers in philosophy named Martin Heidegger, who after being arrested by the Gestapo in the 1930s for her Zionist activities fled from her homeland to Paris, France where she began rescuing young European Jews, who managed to escape from an internment camp in Gurs, France in the early 1940s and who had friendships with a German expatriate named Lotte Köhler and an American writer named Mary McCarthy, confronts a 55-year-old father, husband and SS-Oberststürmbannführer and writes a thesis which addressed critical questions and both challenged and changed peoples' perceptions of the Holocaust, is impelled and reinforced by its cogent narrative structure, subtle character development, rhythmic continuity, efficient use of archival footage, concentrated and commanding style of filmmaking, atmospheric flashback scenes, the masterfully understated acting performance by German actress Barbara Sukowa and the engaging acting performances by English actress Janet McTeer and German actors Axel Milberg and Ulrich Noethen. An acutely cinematographic, densely biographical and empathetic homage which gained, among other awards, the award for Best Actress Barbara Sukowa at the 34th Bavarian Film Awards in 2013.