When German police viciously quell a protest against the shah of Iran, left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof leaves her job, walks away from her middle-class marriage and children, and joins radical anarchist Andreas Baader. Together with Baader’s girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, they form the violent Red Army Faction and perpetrate a slew of terrorist attacks to disrupt the fabric of what they see as an increasingly fascist state.

In Uli Edel’s critically lauded The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), Bruno Ganz delivers a brilliant interpretation of Horst Herold, the real-life chief of the Federal German Police, who believes that the gang can only be combated by understanding the minds and ambitions of the terrorists.