Curator Watchlist
A tense, tightly constructed newsroom thriller with strong performances and impressive period detail, but its attempt to stay “just about the broadcast” leaves the politics underexplored and the perspective notably narrow. It’s worth watching for the craft and momentum, but not if you want a fuller, more contextual… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 34m
Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin
During the 1972 Munich Olympics, an American sports broadcasting crew finds itself thrust into covering the hostage crisis involving Israeli athletes.
Tim Fehlbaum
Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin
A tense, tightly constructed newsroom thriller with strong performances and impressive period detail, but its attempt to stay “just about the broadcast” leaves the politics underexplored and the perspective notably narrow. It’s worth watching for the craft and momentum, but not if you want a fuller, more contextual account of the Munich crisis.
September 5 is built like a pressure cooker: a small team of broadcasters scrambling to make sense of a catastrophe as it unfolds live. The film’s biggest strengths are its momentum, crisp editing, and the way it turns technical decision-making into suspense. The performances are solid across the board, with John Magaro and Peter Sarsgaard especially effective in keeping the room feeling human and frazzled rather than merely procedural.
What makes the movie harder to embrace is the narrowness of its viewpoint. By focusing so tightly on the mechanics of coverage, it often sidesteps the larger political and historical context that gives the event its weight. That choice may be intentional, but it also makes the film feel evasive in places, especially given the subject matter and the contemporary resonance of its release.
As a craft exercise, it works. As a historical drama, it feels incomplete. If you’re drawn to tense, old-school TV-movie urgency and don’t mind a deliberately limited frame, it delivers. If you want a more searching or nuanced engagement with the crisis itself, it will likely frustrate you.
eli (1★) · 4494 likes
Left a bad taste in my mouth. Applies the context of the Holocaust to the "Israeli-Arab conflict" but completely uninterested in Arabs, their history, their culture, who they are as people, or anything to do with them at all other than showing them as shadowy villains, terrorist monsters lurking under American beds. You could replace Palestinians with The Boogeyman or Darth Vader in the script and nothing about the movie would change except for a single line because the film's
zoë rose bryant (3.5★) · 2435 likes
propulsively paced, exceptionally edited, and well-acted across-the-board (john magaro mvp, per usual), but the frustratingly “apolitical” script lacks crucial context and the film’s questionable timing is even more so with that in mind
Chazm (3.5★) · 2223 likes
If you watched “Saturday Night” and thought I wish there was less comedy and more terrorism then this is the movie for you
Sean Fennessey (3.5★) · 1772 likes
This is a made-for-HBO movie from 1996, but it’s a good one and we deserve those, too.
Brandon Streussnig · 1715 likes
Finding it weird how much this straight-down-the-middle drama has inspired me to do this but I think I'm going to go pretty long on this fairly soon. This is incredibly well-acted (Ben Chaplin in particular is throwing HEATERS) and pretty electric in moments, much of that owed to how intimate and claustrophobic the camera is, but I spent the entire runtime feeling sick to my stomach. In its efforts to remain apolitical and show the broadcast "as it was," it's… more
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broadcast journalism, real-time crisis, historical drama, media ethics, political violence, claustrophobic tension, institutional pressure, live television
newsroom thriller, historical drama, real-time suspense, media ethics, 1970s period piece, claustrophobic, political tension, ensemble cast, broadcast journalism, procedural