Weekend Movie Forecast: Inglourious Basterds or Passing Strange

Set in West Germany in the 1970s, The Baader Meinhof Complex concerns that infamous group of radical student guerrillas and their decade-long spree of bank robberies, bombings, cop shootings, and judge assassinations. Time Out's David Fear writes, "Imagine if Hollywood decided to tell the story of 1960s revolutionary group the Weather Underground... Now pretend that the studio then assigns Michael Bay to the project and casts Will Smith, Angelina Jolie and Zac Efron as the young firebrands. Does this sound like a solid representation to you? That’s the equivalent of what this German film does... Even the casting of Teutonic cinema all-stars as lefty extremists wouldn’t be so bad if Edel didn’t have them running around like action heroes to a squealing guitar soundtrack. This isn’t revisionist history; it’s a key moment in political radicalism reduced to an empty pop-cultural posture."