The new docudrama "Carlos" is a three-part epic tale of the rise and fall of notorious "Carlos the Jackal," the Marxist terrorist of the ’70s and ’80s. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly Magazine filed the following review.

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"Carlos" is Olivier Assayas’ epic dramatization of the life of Carlos the Jackal, the notorious, Venezuelan-born radical-Marxist terrorist of the 1970s and 1980s. The movie, which is playing at the IFC Center, is being shown in three parts, and they add up to five-and-a-half hours of rivetingly journalistic docudrama -- a blow-by-blow, murder-by-murder account of a scoundrel’s rise and fall.

Carlos, played by the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez in a raw, screen-grabbing performance, is the kind of man who can walk into a bank, take everyone there hostage, and shoot several of them dead as if he were swatting mosquitoes. He casts himself as a blood brother to the Palestinian movement, but he’s also like Che Guevara reborn as a machine-gun-toting hijacker. He’s a mass of contradictions, a romantic Marxist who throws off the guilty burden of his bourgeois past by transforming himself into a glamorous sociopath who can kill like a machine. Between slugs of Johnny Walker Red, he lures one woman after another into his orbit, yet the most dubious partners he climbs into bed with are political. He allies himself with the sleaziest of Middle Eastern dictators, and he creates a base of operations in any Communist-bloc police state that will have him.

The theme of "Carlos" is the hidden narcissism of the media-age terrorist -- the egomaniac’s delusions that he conceals behind a wall of fanaticism.

Staged in a convulsive, handheld style that suggests a fusion of "Munich" and "Dog Day Afternoon," "Carlos" is often gripping, yet as Carlos’ grand plans fall apart, the movie begins to grow repetitive and a bit monotonous. "Carlos" becomes an increasingly desperate figure, yet there’s no tragedy to his downfall, no real intensification of the film’s earlier fascination.

As well-made as "Carlos" is, the movie doesn’t go deeper. It just gets longer.