Four-Star Films : ‘The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl’

What did she know and when did she know it? This question, with its overtones of criminal suspicion, turns out to be a central concern of German writer-director Ray Muller’s 1993 study of controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Her truncated career will always have an asterisk next to it because her two greatest films, “Triumph of the Will,” a celebration of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, and “Olympia,” an epochal look at the Olympic Games, were made under the generous patronage of the Nazi Party and her personal friend Adolph Hitler. Alive and remarkably vibrant in her 90s, Riefenstahl (pictured) is not at a loss for explanations for almost everything thrown at her, but we’re left with the inescapable feeling that her blindness to Third Reich evils was self-inflicted, the willful looking the other way of someone who had powerful reasons to wish all the bad things would simply disappear (KCET Wednesday at 8 p.m.).

Other selected four-star films airing this week:

Babette’s Feast / Bravo, Monday, 5 and 11:30 p.m.

Stagecoach / Bravo, Tuesday, 8:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 8 a.m.

The Killers (1946) / A&E;, Thursday, 2 a.m.

Rear Window / USA, Friday, 3 a.m.

East of Eden / AMC, Friday, 7 p.m., Saturday, 1 a.m.

The Searchers / TNT, Friday, 7:20 p.m.