Uncharismatic, middle-class bunglers

Robert Stone's intriguing and well-mounted documentary takes in the dotty Symbionese Liberation Army, a small-scale domestic terrorist group that advocated, in practically illiterate terms, the overthrow of the US government in the Seventies.

They were mostly thoroughly uncharismatic, middle-class bunglers whose bête noire was the Vietnam war and whose chief claim to fame was the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.

Stone, with the aid of survivors, uses archival footage, movie clips, photographs and the cynical comments of investigative reporter Tim Findley to document the Army's rise and downfall. If all this wasn't true, it would seem the most arrant fiction. Hearst's own story has already been told by Paul Schrader in the semi-fictional Patty Hearst. But this is the real McCoy, and fascinating.

Guerrilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst
Cert: 12A