Critical reception
German film journalist Dieter Oßwald [ de ] wrote on the Programmkino.de portal: "A meticulously compiled and exciting puzzle of a contradictory biography. 'Visionary? Manipulator? Liar?' the poster asks programmatically. As always, Veiel wisely leaves the answers to the audience. A milestone in biographical filmmaking. At the same time, an important educational film about the power of images - always topical in the age of artificial intelligence". [20]
The American magazine The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "Andres Veiel's new documentary is a psychological portrait of the infamous director of Olympia and Triumph of the Will that shows the 'terrible seductive power' of fascism". [25]
Jens Hinrichsen, from Monopol [ de ] magazine, writes in his detailed review of the film that it once again dismantles the myth of apoliticism and brings the problem of its aesthetics to the present. The film does not view the main character from a "safe distance" but instead brings her into the present. The selected material often works as a mirror of current events. "At its core, Riefenstahl deals with a perverted concept of beauty that conceals the other side of what is beautiful, superior, and victorious — the supposedly unworthy, sick, weak, and also the foreign". In summary, Hinrichsen states that parallels can be drawn with Instagram filters, beauty mania, and body shaming from her work, which celebrates the cult of the perfect body, especially in her film Olympia". "Leni Riefenstahl may not be innocent of the fact that beauty broke away from the triad of the true, the beautiful, and the good". [14]
Owen Gleiberman of the US magazine Variety wrote that the documentary "presents more evidence than we have seen so far that Riefenstahl was part of the regime. However, the evidence remains circumstantial". [26]
Xan Brooks, film critic for the British newspaper The Guardian , writes that Leni Riefenstahl returns to the festival as the star of Andres Veiel's 'extraordinarily profound documentary'. "It was here in Venice that her career peaked before falling into -. The film shows this story and how Riefenstahl tried and failed to save her reputation". The film acknowledges her role as a pioneer: "an ambitious artist in a male-dominated industry whose poetic eye and technical talent turned the medium upside down [...] But the film also shows the ways in which her work is inextricably linked to Nazism - full of it, determined by it - which can never be seen in isolation as innocent and immaculate". [27]
Thomas Schultze, from the movie portal Spot, comes to the conclusion that "Leni Riefenstahl's blindness, as Andres Veiel's film makes clear, is the blindness of an entire country that doesn't want to take responsibility, that doesn't want to learn from what happened, that prefers to look away and deny, thus opening the door to a new look at an abyss that was thought to have been overcome". [28]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , 96% of 55 critics' reviews are positive.The website's consensus reads: "Organizing a treasure trove of archival materials with impressive intellectual rigor, director Andres Veiel's documentary methodically dismantles Leni Riefenstahl's self-mythologizing to offer an historically clear-eyed assessment of her legacy." [29] On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the film holds a score of 82/100 based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". [30]
