Tim Fehlbaum’s taut thriller deploys hand-held cameras and actual footage to gripping effect as it relives a caught-off-guard TV crew’s coverage of a hostage crisis
It’s the news journalist’s dream: to have the scoop and a front-row seat at one of the biggest stories of the decade. But the events of 5 September 1972 – the Black September terrorist attack and hostage crisis at the Munich Olympics – were not a story that the men and women covering the Games for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) expected to be telling. Nor was it, arguably, one that they were fully equipped to tackle. Tim Fehlbaum’s gripping real-life newsroom thriller deftly cuts between the nervy dramatised events behind the scenes and actual archive footage from ABC’s coverage of the tense standoff that saw two members of the Israeli team murdered and a further nine held at gunpoint in the Olympic village.
This lean media procedural, which is so tautly directed that you can practically feel the panic-sweat trickling down the back of your own neck, is a stark contrast to Steven Spielberg’s rather bloated and cumbersome version of the same events and their aftermath in his 2005 picture Munich.
In UK and Irish cinemas
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Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/feb/08/september-5-review-edge-of-the-seat-newsroom-drama-about-1972-olympics-terror-attack-tim-fehlbaum
Author : Wendy Ide
Publish date : 2025-02-08 15:00:23
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