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It is all fun and games until you are ripped to shreds on an exploding TGV, other than that the New York Times raves:

Long before the festival opened, this 5 hour, 33 minute movie about the Venezuelan-born terrorist, international man of mystery and brutishly committed ladies man, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – i.e., Carlos the Jackal – was a must see. The movie, which screened just once and out of competition, is scheduled to play on French television this week. It is likely to pop up in the United States this fall at the New York Film Festival before it plays on-demand and in good old-fashioned theaters.

Bring on the gush:

Opening in the early 1970s, and hop-scotching across assorted hot spots from London to Libya for the next 10 years, “Carlos” is itself something of a heroic endeavor...

A media star from almost the beginning of his blood-splattered career, Carlos has long served as one of pop culture’s brand-name villains...

When he wasn’t globetrotting, he was surfing the sheets, bedding different comradely chicks...

And if Carlos is essentially uninteresting – it’s his violence and the veneer of sexiness that violence can bring with it that makes him a star – it’s because Mr. Assayas has worked hard to create a new kind of movie terrorist. With his beard, beret and black leather jacket, the young Carlos is a militant pin-up...

In Mr. Assayas’s telling, Carlos was also a macho bully for whom weapons, especially guns, weren’t just tools of the terrorist trade. They are also representations of his penis – true Freudian fetishes — a concept that Mr. Assayas literalizes in an ugly-gripping sex scene involving Carlos, one of his writhing conquests and an apparent live (unexploded) grenade...

I’m still not sure what I think of all the groovy music – but that’s what second viewings are for...

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