“Adapted from the Heinrich Böll novel which was in turn based on a real incident, Katharina Blum has frequently been compared with Costa-Gavras' film Z for its pace and implications as a political thriller. After sleeping with an army deserter and suspected terrorist, a domestic servant finds herself persecuted and victimized by a police investigation and subsequent press coverage which turns her past into lurid sensationalism. She becomes the target of abusive mail, obscene phone calls and voyeuristic social disgust, and something in her eventually snaps.... Coming after the post-Watergate glorification of the role of the press as ‘truth-tellers', Katharina Blum unabashedly makes its target the dubious practices of the right-wing German tabloid press. Moreover, as Molly Haskell writes in the Village Voice, it is ‘a film about modern woman--about the ways in which a woman becomes most vulnerable when she tries to ‘go it alone'.... (The) intensely private, even prudish Katharina Blum forfeits the protections of the law and the solicitude of men, vouchsafed her for as long as she abided by the rules of the game....'” Richard Kwietniowski