In May of 1960, Israeli secret agents captured Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi and one of the architects of the Final Solution, who had been hiding in Argentina. His subsequent trial, held in a Jerusalem courtroom and open to the public, was a crucial event in the global reckoning with the Holocaust. It was chronicled by Hannah Arendt in her controversial book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which popularized the phrase “banality of evil” in reference to the supposedly gray, bureaucratic personality Eichmann exhibited on the stand.

“Operation Finale,” an earnest and effective dramatization of the efforts to find Eichmann in South America and convey him to Israel, instead emphasizes the evil of evil. And also, secondarily and not always comfortably, its charm.

This is partly because Eichmann is played by Ben Kingsley, who is capable of suppressing neither his natural charisma nor the impish aspects of it. At one point, while he is in Israeli custody but before he and his captors have left Argentina, Eichmann shares a bit of Nazi humor — a joke at the expense of Hitler, Goebbels and Goring — which elicits a guffaw from one of the Israelis, followed by a spasm of shame. How could anyone find such a monster funny? But of course the people responsible for great evil do not cease to be human, and thus to provoke ordinary human responses, including laughter and empathy.