Terror's Advocate (L'Avocat de la terreur)

Review

Maybe a cigar is just a cigar, but if you smoke a big fat one while holding forth on social justice and, implicitly, the necessity of murdering people to achieve it, you come off as a dangerously self-satisfied and conscienceless voluptuary. In General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, the director Barbet Schroeder gave the egotistical Ugandan mass murderer the time and space to expose himself, and in Terror’s Advocate he does the same thing with stogie-sucking Jacques Vergès, legal defender of some of the most righteously homicidal people on earth. The film is long and increasingly convoluted, but Vergès’s journey, from impassioned anti-colonialist (he defended the Algerian War of Independence’s most glamorous terrorist, Djamila Bouhired, and then married her) to cohort of the Red Brigades, Carlos �the Jackal,� and Klaus Barbie, is a brilliant study in the link between moral corruption and narcissism. — David Edelstein

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New York Magazine Reviews

• David Edelstein's Full Review (10/22/07)