Barbet Schroeder’s fascinating if sprawling documentary touches upon Nazis, the Holocaust, political conspiracies, Chinese philosophy and, of course, symbolism. These are all crammed into Terror’s Advocate, a compelling portrait of the renowned French lawyer Jacques Vergès, friend of Pol Pot, defender of Klaus Barbie and of terrorists everywhere.

The symbol here is the Cuban cigar, held, sucked, sniffed and waved by Vergès in nearly every shot. It seemed – to me at least – to be a surrogate phallus for a man emasculated by his own self-hatred, a man driven (by his own admission) by a postcolonial inferiority complex (his mother was Vietnamese; he felt marginalised) and a man whose apparent self-confidence and hatred of systemic authority masked massive and life-defining insecurities. Or maybe it was just a cigar.

12A, 135mins

Editor's choice

• Proms Podcast with Danielle De Nisse
• The Bachchan tour is dynamite!
• Dark Knight storms to $155m record