Recensioni de* critic*

It seems that through its assumptions of knowledge on the part of the audience, this movie was intended for an elite or German crowd, though its deep adherence to the stodgy conventions of the biopic would argue otherwise. It may be Katz's inexperience as a screenwriter that led to so many creaky choices... What makes it worth seeking out is the very thing that may have made it seem undramatic in the eyes of its creators—the ideas Arendt formulated about the banality of evil.

For me, part of the singularity of both Blücher and Arendt (whom I met only briefly, once in their Riverside Drive apartment) was the degree to which art, politics, philosophy, moral seriousness, and a remarkable passion for ethics interfaced in their discourse and lives with an unflagging intensity, and what I cherish most about von Trotta's movie is the degree to which she — and, above all, Barbara Sukowa as Arendt — capture this.

Hannah Arendt is best when worked up into fits of intellectual sparring that are so sublimely over-the-top, it's clear von Trotta is having fun... [Yet] It meanders from screwball comedy to strident biopic to historical drama with no central thesis worthy of its philosophical subject.

Von Trotta's film is not so much interested in Arendt's political theories, preferring to view her as the embodiment of the strength and wisdom of the Jewish survivor. It's perhaps a safer way in which to deal with Arendt's legacy, as a fictional account could never do it justice. Still, the film remains true to Arendt's stubborn vision, as it portrays her inner, personal conflicts with a nuanced touch.

In this fourth fruitful collaboration with director Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg), Barbara Sukowa delivers a beautifully modulated performance, showing the rigor of Arendt's thought and convictions while revealing the contours of a passionate woman with complex relationships. Evincing an eye for period detail and an admirable sensitivity, von Trotta traces the postwar dilemmas for Jews tasked with looking back at the Shoah, and forward to rebuilding a people.

Like the dialogue, the prop [Hannah's cigarrette] is there to demonstrate her European worldliness, as well as her famous sociability. We never learn what brand Hannah smokes. Like many of the vignettes that von Trotta uses to bring the philosopher to life, her bad habit is less a concrete detail than a kind of shorthand for the smoldering intensity of her thought and for her ordinary human weaknesses. Its banality highlights the major shortcoming of the film.

Hannah Arendt... is just as calculating and smart as its lead character, cutting intermittently between time periods to explore crucial gaps in Arendt's back-story without relying on sentiment. Scenes of silent contemplation are interspersed with intense moments of heated discourse, making this one of the rare films that respects the process of internal struggle while revealing the fallacies of rushed judgment.

It reduces Arendt to a mere victim, a poor woman who was just asking questions. As with her last film with Sukowa, the Hildegard von Bingen biopic "Vision," "Hannah Arendt" is a reductive, indifferently filmed look at a proto-feminist.

Pouncing on the chance to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, resulting in her controversial pronouncement about the disparity between "the mediocrity of the man" and "the horror of the deeds," the writer-philosopher Hannah Arendt is brought to life by a mesmerizing Barbara Sukowa in Margarethe von Trotta's film.

Von Trotta's film takes a while to get warmed up, expending a fair bit of chit-chatty screen time on Arendt's complicated marriage to poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) and her friendship with novelist Mary McCarthy (perfectly realized by Janet McTeer). But once we get to the Eichmann trial and its aftermath, it's mesmerizing.

Despite a nuanced lead turn by Sukowa, who exudes the requisite thoughtfulness and gravity of a woman who prized thinking as the greatest of all human virtues, Hannah Arendt sometimes seems, narratively speaking, to be on shaky footing. Between intermittent suggestions of covert hanky-panky perpetrated by peripheral players and Hannah's flashbacks to an affair with her former professor, the film too often feels unfocused.

Eschewing any serious consideration of the sustained critical response to Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt prefers hagiography. It is a one-sided argument, so intent on ensuring Arendt's victory that it adulterates the very nature of the conflict over Eichmann, and over the legacy of Arendt's thought.