Carlos

Olivier Assayas's Carlos (2010) is an epic chronicle of the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, made for French television in a five-and-a-half-hour version and released in cinemas in a shorter cut. It premiered out of competition at Cannes, won the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries, and turned up on a great many lists of the year's best screen work in any format.

Édgar Ramírez gives a magnetic, multilingual performance as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, charting his change from committed revolutionary into vain mercenary across decades and continents. Assayas directs with the sweep and propulsion of a great political thriller, and the centrepiece is a tense, feature-length recreation of the 1975 OPEC hostage-taking in Vienna; all the while he coolly takes apart the narcissism and self-mythology beneath the radical rhetoric. The film moves restlessly across Europe and the Middle East, scored to driving post-punk.

Critics praised Ramírez's star-making turn and Assayas's command of scale and pace. Gripping, ambivalent and intellectually sharp, Carlos works as a thriller about international terror and as a study of the ego that drives it, and it is one of the most ambitious European productions of its decade. Its blurring of cinema and prestige television proved influential, and Ramírez's performance is still the definitive screen portrait of the man who became a symbol of an era of political violence.