“Carlos,” Olivier Assayas’s fictionalization of the brutal Marxist turned mercenary, examines leftwing militancy from the inside out. And like Steven Soderbergh’s “Che,” a 2008 gloss on Ernesto Guevara, and “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” a 2008 drama about West German terrorists, “Carlos,” although set in the past, often speaks more potently to the September 11 world than most mainstream fiction films that try to address terror head-on.

“I’m a soldier, I’m not a martyr,” the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal announces in the film. He delivers the line in 1975 in a heated exchange with the radical true believers with whom he has taken OPEC ministers hostage. It was one of his more spectacular operations as a self-professed professional revolutionary, and he had carefully dressed for the part in a black beret and leather jacket meant to invoke Che Guevara, pop martyr supreme.

The distinction between soldier and martyr is crucial for what it says about Carlos, whose revolutionary rhetoric will grow increasingly hollow as the movie goes on, and for what it says about his time and our own, with its armies of soldiers and martyrs. This is partly because “Carlos,” released in May at the Cannes Film Festival, is set at the intersection of idealism and violence. Hollywood films don’t often cross that intersection, and even nominally political films prefer to keep idealism and violence separate and neatly embodied by clear-cut heroes and villains.

War movies like 2007’s “Rendition” and this year’s “The Green Zone” turn on the commercial imperative that the bad times must end when the movies do. They insist that everyone learn a lesson. In Mr. Assayas’s film, there are no teachable moments. Throughout, Carlos, born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, enjoys the spotlight. An anti-imperialist who liked luxury, he bought the Che-style beret he wore for the OPEC raid in a Vienna boutique, completing his look with a Beretta and a leather jacket from Pierre Cardin.

If Mr. Assayas’s Carlos looks like a star it’s because the real man was. (He is now serving a life sentence for murder in France.) And Mr. Assayas, by casting a lead with good looks, plays into the common assumption that the lead , especially if he’s a brooding beauty, is not just the story’s hero but also its moral center.

Like Carlos, the title character in “Che” is aware of his own image, as when, in his soldier’s uniform, he asks for a touch of powder before being interviewed on American TV. The movie is largely organized around significant battles, but the emphasis on grinding action also expresses the passion of Che, who, at one point, explains that what motivates the revolutionary is “love.” This idea appears in “Socialism and the New Man,” one of Che’s oftquoted essays (“Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.”).

Mr. Soderbergh delivers this juxtaposition between love and bullets without overt comment, a dissatisfying tactic for those seeking a verdict instead of a diagnosis. In “Che” the world smolders, as if in preparation for the coming conflagrations. In “Carlos” and “The Baader Meinhof Complex” it burns.

Some of that heat comes from their resonance: both fill in some prehistory of contemporary revolutionary movements in the Middle East and work as cautionary tales about the perversions of idealism. An ideologue turned dedicated mercenary, bungler, opportunist and relic, Carlos is absurd and murderously real.

In “Carlos,” Mr. Assayas builds an argument about terrorism that strips the glamour off it little by little, specifically in scenes of people being executed, including a French Embassy worker, his pregnant wife and their unborn child. At that moment, the vestigial idealism that clung to the revolutionary struggles Carlos once signed on with is snuffed out.

In their different ways and with divergent ends, “Carlos,” “Che” and “The Baader Meinhof Complex” explore the extremes of left-wing ideologies that, with the end of the Cold War, exited the world stage. If these movies do so persuasively it’s partly because they belong to the past, while a film like “Green Zone” depicts a present with no end in sight.


Manohla Dargis/ESSAY