Despite a few rough edges, Kraume's film is driven by a powerful commitment-and extraordinary lead actors-to dramatize Fritz Bauer's historic contribution.

| Feb 26, 2021

The screenplay by Kraume and Olivier Guez create a story that, although slow-moving, is gripping. The cinematography adds a visual layer that adds to the mood of the film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2021

Fritz Bauer is an engrossing full-submersion baptism into the best and worst of what it meant to be German in the awful middle years of the 20th Century.

| Jun 10, 2020

The dialogue is too expository and makes references to events that we should see dramatized, especially Bauer's earlier life and how he would have experienced 1945.

| Feb 13, 2019

Kraume deftly blends historical drama and a legal procedural with a noirish cold war era spy thriller elements in the highly entertaining The People vs. Fritz Bauer.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2018

The result may not be highbrow experimental art cinema, but ... its explicit mission to tell Bauer's story to as many people as it can shouldn't be underrated in the current global political climate.

| Aug 25, 2018

The film stupidly demands the younger man's sacrifice for Bauer's continued vigilance.

| Nov 29, 2017

Director/co-writer Lars Kraume navigates this complex, fascinating story chronologically with his and Olivier Guez's screenplay a targeted indictment of post-WWII Nazis hiding in plain sight with each other's cooperation duplicity.

| Aug 29, 2017

Somewhat conservative in its production crafts but alive with moral risk and ideological duplicity

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 31, 2017

... more compelling as a character study than a true-life historical saga.

| Jan 27, 2017

The film consists mostly of serious white men standing in rooms, talking and sometimes arguing with one another. This isn't a criticism, per se. A serious German story deserves a serious German film -- but it's worth knowing this ahead of time.

| Dec 2, 2016

A more-or-less successful thriller that can rely for tension on the shadowy setting of a society trying to hide from itself.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 21, 2016

If it all feels a little familiar, that's because Labyrinth Of Lies covered much of the same ground last year, if not nearly as well.

| Original Score: 3/.5 | Oct 20, 2016

Add this to the ever-growing list of films that bring a moral reckoning to the horrors of World War II, a period of which, we're often reminded, "we must never forget."

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 29, 2016

The movie belongs to Klaussner, who gives Bauer a bulldog stubbornness and a hint of eccentricity that makes the character indelible.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2016

A deliberate picture, never achieving a full gallop, but the subtleties of performance and history are engrossing

| Original Score: B | Sep 8, 2016

Klaussner's powerful performance as Bauer ... snaps the picture back into focus.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 8, 2016

The movie belongs to Burghart Klaussner, who plays the resolutely unheroic Bauer with gruff dignity, a short fuse, sad cynicism and a refusal to quiet his conscience.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 8, 2016

The political situation presented here is complex, and it's reassuring to have a guide as clear-eyed as Bauer taking us through it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 2, 2016

It's a compelling portrait both of Bauer and of a fraught moment in German history.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 1, 2016