The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Reifenstahl (1993)

The horrible footageful documentary from...some German guy, I'm not looking up his name. Riefenstahl, for those of you not familiar, was the director responsible for "Triumph of the Will," the most famous and effective propaganda film ever made. A Nazi film so beautiful and sinister that it makes you mistrust beauty itself. She was arguably the most talented female to ever direct a film, until Nancy Meyers. She is a fascinating subject: The dancer who became a silent film actress, then became a brilliant director, then directing films for the Third Reich. After the war, she was imprisoned for a while, then exonerated (she never was technically a member of the Nazi party). She spent the last sixty years of her life trying to clear her name and get work. Either she's in complete denial, or her head was up her ass (It was just an assignment! We didn't know that Hitler was bad!) Either way, she's a bitch. I doubt she was ever that meek or naive, she knew Hitler and Goebbels intimately, and the filmmaker catches her in many lies. She blows her stack every time this happens, and the "kindly little old lady" mask (she was ninety when this was made) drops with a thud. The film feels like a dry "60 Minutes" piece that overstays it's welcome. It was engrossing for the first forty minutes, little did I know I had another TWO AND A HALF HOURS to go. She lived even longer than the running time of this movie, to age 101, still trying to get work. The personification of Aryan health.