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Terror's Advocate

2007 · 2h 15m · Unrated Documentary
Directed by Barbet Schroeder

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Overview

A documentary on Jacques Vergès, the controversial lawyer and former Free French Forces guerrilla, exploring how Vergès assisted, from the 1960s onwards, anti-imperialist terrorist cells operating in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Participants interviewed include Algerian nationalists Yacef Saadi, Zohra Drif, Djamila Bouhired and Abderrahmane Benhamida, Khmer Rouge members Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, once far-left activists Hans-Joachim Klein and Magdalena Kopp, terrorist Carlos the Jackal, lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, neo-Nazi Ahmed Huber, Palestinian politician Bassam Abu Sharif, Lebanese politician Karim Pakradouni, political cartoonist Siné, former spy Claude Moniquet, novelist and ghostwriter Lionel Duroy, and investigative journalist Oliver Schröm.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
87%
Tomatometer
Fresh

The movie functions crackingly well as a non-fiction international thriller.

Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star
Fresh

The lawyer's intense isolation, his solitary, perverse rage against the world, against France, against conventional opinion, is felt most deeply.

Jason McBride, Globe and Mail
Fresh

Schroeder's film, which combines interviews with many of the key figures in Verges' career with grainy historical footage, lets its subject speak for itself but leaves little doubt of where the filmmaker stands.

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times
Fresh

For just a moment, ignore politics. Consider Jacques Verges simply as star. The radical French lawyer is an absolutely compelling figure onscreen: exotic, resolute, beguilingly smug.

Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
Fresh

Jacques Verges makes for compelling documentary film fodder: He is arrogant, cosmopolitan, politically unpredictable and enmeshed in the roots of modern international terrorism.

Tamara Straus, San Francisco Chronicle

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