Carlos

Olivier Assayas's Carlos (2010) is an epic chronicle of the notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal, made for French television in a five-and-a-half-hour version and released theatrically in a shorter cut. Premiered out of competition at Cannes, it won the Golden Globe for Best Miniseries and was widely ranked among the finest screen works of its year in any format.

Édgar Ramírez gives a magnetic, multilingual performance as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, charting his transformation from committed revolutionary into vain mercenary across decades and continents. Assayas directs with the sweep and propulsion of a great political thriller — the centrepiece being a tense, feature-length recreation of the 1975 OPEC hostage-taking in Vienna — while coolly dissecting 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, and the project blurred the line between cinema and prestige television in a way that proved influential. Gripping, ambivalent and intellectually sharp, Carlos is both a thrilling chronicle of international terror and a study of the ego that drives it — one of the most ambitious European productions of its decade. The project's blurring of cinema and prestige television proved widely influential, and Ramírez's magnetic, multilingual performance remains the definitive screen portrait of the man who became a symbol of an era of political violence.