Movie · 2024 · Thriller, Drama, History · 1h 34m · R · English
Curator score: 5.1/10 (182.4K ratings)
The day terror went live.
Overview
During the 1972 Munich Olympics, an American sports broadcasting crew finds itself thrust into covering the hostage crisis involving Israeli athletes.
Ratings
Curator score: 5.1/10
IMDb: 7.1/10
Letterboxd: 3.43/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
Metacritic: 76
TMDB: 7.0/10
Director
Tim Fehlbaum
Production
BerghausWöbke Filmproduktion, Projected Picture Works, Constantin Film, Edgar Reitz Filmproduktion
Cast
Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin, Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem, Georgina Rich, Corey Johnson, Marcus Rutherford, Daniel Adeosun, Benjamin Walker, Ferdinand Dörfler, Solomon Mousley, Caroline Ebner, Daniel Betts, Leif Eduard Eisenberg, Sebastian Jehkul, Rony Herman, Jeff Book, Robert Porter Templeton, Stephen Fraser
Where to watch
Amazon Prime Video, fuboTV, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, Philo, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
Viewers who like claustrophobic, real-time procedural dramas
Fans of newsroom and broadcast-set thrillers
People interested in historical crises told through media logistics
Audiences who prioritize editing, pacing, and ensemble acting
Skip if
You want a balanced political treatment of the Munich events
You’re sensitive to films that feel emotionally or ideologically one-sided
You prefer expansive historical epics over contained chamber pieces
You’re looking for a deeply contextualized account of Palestinian-Israeli history
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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… more 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… more
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