Common Sense Media Review
By Andrea Beach
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
German hostage crisis docu is gripping but harrowing.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 15+?
Any Positive Content?
Where to Watch
Videos and Photos
Gladbeck: The Hostage Crisis
Parent and Kid Reviews
What's the Story?
GLADBECK: THE HOSTAGE CRISIS is a documentary about a 1988 bank robbery in the small town of Gladbeck in Germany. The robbery goes wrong and the two perpetrators take two bank employees hostage. As they make their way around northern Germany and even into the Netherlands, they take a bus full of passengers hostage for a time, eventually returning to Germany with three hostages in a getaway car. Original footage and still photos follow the events and the media circus surrounding them to a tragic end 54 hours later.
Is It Any Good?
This is an intense, harrowing, and gripping account of the violence surrounding a real bank robbery and taking of hostages. Gladbeck: The Hostage Crisis has a strong point of view about the role that the media, especially journalists on the ground following the perpetrators, played in escalating the situation at nearly every turn. Older teens who can handle the intense material and who are fans of the true-crime genre will find a lot of food for thought here.
The filmmakers provide very little context, but viewers who didn't know about this apparently watershed moment in German media history should be able to figure things out as the events unfold. Law enforcement is left largely out of the story, so viewers interested in other points of view and/or more context can be encouraged to research it.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the violence in Gladbeck: The Hostage Crisis. Do you react differently to footage of real events than you do to fictional or fantasy violence? How do you think the filmmakers handled the violence in this movie?
News media and journalists aren't shown in a favorable light here. How can you tell what the filmmaker's point of view is?
How much responsibility do you think the media and press had for how the events unfolded and how the crisis ended?
Movie Details
- On DVD or streaming : June 8, 2022
- Director : Volker Heise
- Studio : Netflix
- Genre : Documentary
- Topics : History
- Run time : 91 minutes
- MPAA rating :
- Last updated : September 29, 2025
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