More than half a century later, September 5th, 1972 should still be a day that lives in infamy -- in which the world watched as a group of Palestinian terrorists held innocent Israeli athletes hostages in an ordeal that left eleven Israelis dead.

The film September 5 tells the story from a new perspective. Ultimately, the unenviable duty of covering the story fell upon a team of sportscasters who were in Germany to cover the Olympics.

Given the timing of this film's release, the connections to recent events shouldn't be lost on anyone. Perhaps some of the "from the river to the sea people" who thought that Israel is in the Caribbean should take a couple of hours to watch this film to gain some historical perspective.

That said, although the film is about the act of terrorism that plagued the Munich Olympics, it's about much more than that. This was the first terror attack that featured live, on location, minute to minute coverage. The film deals with a lot of questions of journalistic ethics with no clean answers. Surely enough, the characters needed to make huge decisions on the fly. Difficult questions that seemed callous to even ask like, "Can we show someone getting shot on live television?" had to be asked.

This is the only film that I've seen from director Tim Fehlbaum so far. His work was damn solid. The world building was effective and efficient. The broadcast technology at the time was often a character in and of itself. At a time when movies seem to be suffering from bloated runtimes, this film comes in at a brisk 94 minutes. You know who everybody is, and why they're there, and why they're reacting the way that they are.

Although Peter Sarsgaard got top billing, the film really belongs to John Magaro (who I didn't recognize from Past Lives) as Geoffrey Mason, an inexperienced head of the control room who was thrust into the situation. The gravity of the situation is never lost on him. The pressure to get things first is always in balance with the duty to get things right.

This is a good film that's more than worth your time.

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