AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

kaaber-2 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.

Alonso Gil Salinas It is a really good film. Though I would highly recommend reading the book in which it is based ("Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil") to fully appreciate the dialogue, the film conveys what Hannah Arendt really wanted to communicate: that an external situation highly influences (not to the point of determining, because there are always exceptions) the behavior of "normal" people. In this case, totalitarianism and evil behavior. I would only add that some commentary should have been included in the final credits about what happened regarding the polemic she caused with the passage of time. I think a paragraph I read in an Internet essay by Dr. Daniel Maier-Katkin (http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/64/84) is very clear about it: "The tide of history since then has been mostly with her. In politics this is due to the widespread opposition especially among students and intellectuals to the Viet Nam war in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The conduct of American leaders – Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, and then Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger – brought home the idea of "banal" evil. In social science, landmark studies of obedience to authority by Stanley Milgram at Yale and of prisoners and guards by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford gave shocking evidence of the extent to which ordinary people could be induced to harm others. Among historians, with the notable exception of Daniel Goldhagen's book Ordinary Germans: Hitler's Willing Executioners (which attributes the Holocaust to a tradition of exterminationist anti-Semitism in German culture) recent scholarship on the Third Reich – Ian Kershaw on Hitler, Robert Gellately on the S.S., Christopher Browning on the Einsatzgruppen – tends to confirm Arendt's thesis that ordinary people were complicitous with the Nazi regime for reasons best characterized as banal. In international affairs, the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism and recent genocidal catastrophes in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur have reinforced the idea that great evil may arise from the false beliefs and banal motives of ordinary people". The above mentioned Dr. Zimbardo published in 2007 a book titled "The Lucifer Effect" in which he explains how good people turn evil. Years before, he had testified for the defense of a guard at Abu Ghraib prison rejecting the idea that the events did not reflect the particular military situation in which they happened. Of course, this is difficult to accept, because it implies much more culpability on the higher authorities which allowed such a "situation" to emerge in the first place. I guess the argument suggests that it is far more difficult to accept that there is a high probability that "normal people" like ourselves can fall into evil behavior due to a horrendous and shocking situation in which, for whatever reason (and without fully realizing it) we might fall; than conceiving an evil nature (an awful exception) in he who behaves in such a way. Anyway, do not misunderstand the idea. The fact that the situation can have a predominant role does not exculpate the perpetrator. (spoiler alert) As Hannah Arendt's last phrase of her book (talking to Eichmann's about his overall behavior) states: "This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang".

susanjhirad This is a powerful movie that raises important moral issues, not just about the Holocaust, but about how many people "go along" with atrocities without thinking, thereby giving up their humanity. Strangely, just after we watched it on Netflix streaming, I turned to CNN's "The 70's" which was showing Sergeant Calley and his platoon mindlessly killing a whole Vietnamese village, including innocent men, women and children. He too claimed he was just "following orders." In the same episode on the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger is shown after he has ordered the massive bombing of civilians in Vietnam. He comments casually, "It's sad, but we had to do it." An excellent movie that shows how hard it is to speak out when it offends the popular sensibilities, in this case when Arendt sees Eichmann, not as "the devil" (which is far too easy for the rest of us)but as part of machine that had given up its right to humanity by not thinking about the consequences of his actions.

SnoopyStyle 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.