Critic Reviews

Bravura narrative filmmaking on a hugely ambitious scale, Carlos is a spectacular achievement.

Carlos is nevertheless a movie that one can somehow remember vividly for months. Much of this power is due to the whiplash widescreen cinematography (oft-mistaken for DV), the hopped-up editing, and, not least, Ramirez's aptly arrogant, fully transfixing, Method-style turn.

Though it runs an epic five-and-a-half hours (it was made for French TV), Carlos books like no film since "Goodfellas." You will not be bored, ever.

Hypnotic and sprawling five-hour-plus piece of cinematic genius.

One of the high points of last month's Telluride Film Festival was, as I wrote at the time, spending 5½ hours in a darkened theater-with one short break around the four-hour mark-to watch Olivier Assayas's shocking and edifying epic.

It's a tremendously absorbing blend of history, journalism and drama. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again.

A preening terrorist for the Me generation, his primary drive was vanity and his main professional asset an absence of empathy.

I haven't seen the shorter version, but I would hate to lose one moment of the gripping 66-minute sequence-really the heart of the movie-in which Carlos plots and executes his spectacular 1975 raid on the meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna.

Part of the accomplishment of Carlos is the sheer accumulation of detail the movie amasses, and the longer running time gives you a deeper sense of the terrorist lifestyle, and when and why Ilich gradually succumbed to ego and self-glorification without realizing it.

Carlos is mostly tense and thrilling, revealing the poisonous side of global citizenship.