Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Inmechon The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

JasparLamarCrabb A devastating, monumental work by Marcel Ophuls. Tracing the life of Klaus Barbie, the infamous "butcher of Lyon," Ophuls dissects the facts that led up to this Nazi's nearly forty years as a free man through interviews with citizens of Lyon, French resistance leaders, politicians, ex-CIC (CIA) operatives as well as with several of Barbie's victims. The film addresses not only Barbie's horrendous war crimes, but questions both French and American collusion during and after WWII (and the onset of the cold war). From France to Washington DC to South America, Ophuls travels the globe peeling back the mysteries of what allowed Barbie to live on for so many years after the war. It's a sad, sometimes horrifying account. Monumental, but NEVER slow. There are appearances by Lucie & Raymond Aubrac as well as famed "Nazi Hunter" Beate Klarsfeld. Ophuls also gets insight from writer Günter Grass, filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, and many, many others. In French, German, English and Spanish.

tieman64 Marcel Ophuls, son of esteemed film director Max Ophuls, directs "Hotel Terminus", an award winning documentary about Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. Beginning in childhood, and therefore innocence, and ending with Klaus becoming "the Butcher of Lyon", the film traces Klaus' life by assembling over forty years of footage and interviews culled from over 120 hours of discussion with former Nazis, American intelligence officers, South American government officials, victims of Nazi atrocities and witnesses.A Gestapo Chief in Lyon, Klaus was responsible for torturing and murdering resistance fighters, Jewish men, woman and children, and had thousands deported to Hitler's death camps. After the war, like many German and SS officers, he was protected by and worked with the US Army, who hid him in Bolivia where he lived for 3 decades as a business man. It was only in 1987, when the Cold War was drawing to a close, and with it Klaus' usefulness to the US, that Klaus was brought to trial in a French courtroom for crimes against humanity.Ophuls paints a truly complex portrait of evil, his film highlighting how responsibility is diffused in hierarchal structures, how Communist paranoia resulted in many Nazi officers being willingly absorbed by the amnesic Allies, and delineating the various forces which allowed Klaus to survive after the war. A stand out scene involves Ophuls (himself German born) revealing his Jewish identity to an associate of Klaus, but much of this 4 and a half hour documentary is rather low key, revoking easy sensationalism for an objective, probing tone.Surprisingly, the film has a comedic streak, Ophuls pointing out the inconsistencies in testimonies, undermining the statements of various German officers with clever quips and using German folksongs as an ironic counterpoint to several scenes. 9/10 – Worth one viewing. Makes a good companion piece to Ophuls' "The Sorrow and the Pity". See "The Conformist".

Michael Neumann Marcel Ophuls' mammoth four-and-one-half hour-long portrait of Gestapo commandant Klaus Barbie, the notorious Butcher of Lyon, is more than just a biography of another Nazi mass murderer. The film also provides a meticulous study of the forces which allowed him to survive for so long, from wartime anti-Semitism to post-war Communist paranoia to a prevailing what's-done-is-done attitude of retroactive amnesia. Ophuls is not so complacent, and makes no apologies for his sometimes confrontational approach to the subject. In his mind those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and the sheer volume of verbal testimony, from enemies and friends alike, is only the director's way of ensuring we neither forgive nor forget. The scope of the film is vast, covering over forty years and spanning several continents, but the scale is intimate: one voice, one detail at a time, making it an exhaustive but hardly exhausting account of one monstrous but admittedly small cog in an evil machine, pieces of which are still well-oiled and operating even today.

Alexander Rivinius Along with "The Sorrow and the Pity" (from same director), this is definitely one of the most gripping and informative documentaries you will ever get to see. Focusing of the life of the Klaus Barbie, a ruthless SS interrogator later labeled "The Butcher of Lyons", implicated in over 4000 deaths and the deportation of over 7000 Jews in occupied France, this documentary not only paints a relentless picture of the German occupation in France, but also of the 40-year manhunt of a Nazi war criminal. Employed by the American government after the war for his contacts, and later protected by several other governments eager to use his "talents", Marcel Ophuls exposes a complex web of political intrigue and deceit that spans over decades. While some spectators seemed to get a bit lost having absolutely no prior knowledge about European war history not involving an American elite team saving the world, just knowing that France was occupied by Germans during WWII and that legendary French Resistance Leader Jean Moulin was one of Barbie's many victims should be enough to follow and understand this must-see documentary just fine!