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.

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.

When Eichmann went on trial for war crimes, "the man in the glass booth", Wallace Shawn, The New Yorker's editor, had the brainstorm of having Hannah Arendt write about the trial. The series of articles touched off an explosion of controversy, when careless reading of her work was misinterpreted as claiming that the Jews were complicit in the Holocaust.

How on earth do you make a movie about a woman who spends her time thinking? Well, there are a lot of cigarettes smoked in this movie, and Barbara Sukowa as Professor Arendt spends a lot of time lying on a divan, while she struggles with the question of how such a non-entity as Eichmann could have accomplished such evil. Today, the phrase 'the banality of evil' is a commonplace, and it is understood that small causes can produce huge results. Then it was a shocking statement: that evil is not Hitler standing on the stage at Nuremberg ranting, it's a bureaucrat confronted with a problem of how to get the Jews to Dachau, treating it as an exercise in logistics, with never a thought as to what would be done to them once they had arrived. That wasn't his problem.

The movies have always had a problem producing works that show thought. Showing German intellectuals smoking thousands of cigarettes, showing mathematicians drinking gallons of coffee, these images lack drama. Somehow this movie shows thought. It shows intellectual courage. It's an amazing movie.