The Cult of the Suicide Bomber (2006)

Narrator Robert Baer tries to understand why humans would give up their lives to take those of others, and he's gained remarkable access to those at the center of this ideology.

An engrossing if intellectually thin documentary that purports to explain how suicide bombing evolved from a weapon of war into a weapon of terror.

[Robert] Baer's Tocquevillean tour is a spare but indispensable political-cultural exposé of a country and region poised to play an increasing and increasingly troubling role in the history of our own.

Thoughtful, incisive, controversial docu.

Many of us, of course, have spent hours at the movies relishing violence and explosions as entertainment. In the documentary The Cult of the Suicide Bomber, we see explosions in which real people die, and the sequence comes as a kick in the gut.

[The film] matter-of-factly enters the mosques, homes, shrine rooms, personal spaces, and neighborhoods of Muslim martyrs, probing the suicide bomber paradigm as it grew out of the Iranian Revolution and became a global phenomenon.