There is a fascinating dichotomy at the center of Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, the historically-rooted tale of how an ABC Sports production crew engineered a live broadcast of the events now known as the “Munich massacre,” one that reached a peak of 900 million viewers around the world. At its core, this conflict could be boiled down to a now-colloquial phrase: “With great power comes great responsibility.” But that’s only because television stations are inherently supplied with power by virtue of having an audience, and therefore by having something to cover that interests the masses. For sports networks, the typical news of note regards superstar trades and big games; on Sept. 5, 1972, the latter transcended what those who create and consume television could have ever imagined.
Roughly two-thirds of the way into the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, eight members of the Palestinian militant organization known as “Black September” infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and took nine more as hostages. Unlike Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated Munich, which dramatized the assassination attempt on the massacre’s perpetrators as carried out by Mossad, Fehlbaum’s film – which the Swiss director co-wrote with Moritz Binder and Alex David – follows the aforementioned ABC Sports team working roughly 100 yards from the apartment building where the Israeli Olympians were captured and held. Despite the network’s top brass wishing for its news branch to take coverage duties from the folks whose most recent dilemma was whether or not an America vs. Cuba boxing match was a political story or an emotional one, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin, the film’s MVP, to use sports parlance), and Geoff Mason (John Magaro) are hell-bent on following the story as only they can: From up close.
Mason, a young producer who Arledge (then the president of ABC Sports) and Bader (the network’s Vice President of Olympic Operations) sternly refer to as a member of the channel’s B Team, was among the first to hear the gunshots that sparked chaos. He seeks the help of an on-site translator, Marianne Gebhardt (The Teachers’ Lounge’s Leonie Benesch, playing a composite character), in order to understand radio communications between the local police; ABC Sports director of broadcast operations and engineering Jacques Lesgards (Zinedine Soualem) is also on hand, and Fehlbaum wastes no time assuring his audience that he does not intend to leave this team’s side in telling this story. Once Arledge – who retired to his hotel room for some rest and a much-needed phone call with his family – and Bader – sound asleep in an on-site technical closet – have returned from their respective respites, September 5 kicks into high gear and never looks back.

Perhaps it’s the former television producer in me, but for a ticking-clock thriller, the angle that Fehlbaum and co. have elected to take here works wonders, showing us what Mason and the control room are seeing and nothing more. That they are seeing very little, relying heavily on commentary from Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker, saddled with a lot of necessary exposition given that he’s ABC’s only journalist reporting from directly inside the Olympic Village) to help guide the direction of their broadcast, makes it that much more compelling. The film’s “action” scenes thus boil down to stressful conversations between producers, researchers, and, occasionally, outsiders. At one point, German police invade the newsroom in an attempt to take full control of the situation before Arledge shoos them away, asserting the importance of the broadcast in communicating horrifying realities to concerned viewers everywhere. The irony to that very idea surfaces later, when one of ABC’s cameras catch a glimpse of a television set inside the hotel room where the hostages are being held. “Are the terrorists seeing this?” Mason asks, referring to undercover police officers sneaking into the building from the roof.
September 5 is chock-full of somewhat rhetorical questions such as these, many of them coming from Magaro’s Mason, a soft-spoken junior deputy to the many sheriffs in his midst, if you will. (“What do I tell the cameras?” he says, ever-focused on capturing the most profound images. “I mean, can we show someone being shot on live television?”) Evidently, there’s no charm to the proceedings, just a dark cloud looming over what feels like a runaway train careening towards an inevitable finale from the moment the cameras flick on, but the makeshift team of Mason, Gebhardt, and a few other out-of-their-depth crew members give us something worth rooting for. The ideal outcome – one that the team believes to have been achieved towards the end of the film, despite what history buffs know is still to come – is the freedom of the hostages, something that both the film’s audience and its characters understand while anticipating the worst.
This is precisely where the aforementioned paradox is at its darkest and most apparent. Once the newsroom’s lights have dimmed and its feeds shut down for the day, “our worst fears [having] been realized” in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, as Jim McKay (shown in expertly-deployed archival footage that makes it appear as though he’s communicating with the control room in real time) says on air, the task at hand is preparing for tomorrow. The “biggest” stories for journalists, television or otherwise, tend to double as the most harrowing and difficult to understand, let alone report. When Mason apologizes to Gebhardt for sending her on an assignment that places her close to the tragedy’s final moments, he attempts to empathize; “I can only imagine the things you saw,” he says, Magaro’s shaky timbre making its emotional presence felt. “I saw nothing,” Gebhardt replies. “I was there with hundreds of people… We were waiting for something to happen because we wanted to take a picture of it.”

Perhaps it’s this idea that has made September 5 so off-putting for so many. The film released wide on Jan. 17, directly into a news cycle that continues to be dominated by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, the nations having just recently agreed to a ceasefire that would see Hamas release hostages that were abducted in Gaza back in October of 2023. On Jan. 1, 2025, NYC Alamo United – a union of New York-based Alamo Drafthouse employees – posted a petition directed at the popular dine-in theater chain to stop screening Fehlbaum’s film, which was originally scheduled for a one-off private screening on November 22 before being “quietly added to our schedule.” The petition continues, “Now we are expected to serve food and drink while audiences relive the bloodletting of 1972, and as Palestinians face constant bombardment, starvation, and sexual violence at the hands of the Israeli army in 2025.” As of this writing, the petition has 1,004 signatures; September 5 is still showing at Alamo’s locations in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
As a movie, September 5 itself is relatively apolitical, yet I have no doubt that for every viewer it thrills, there will be one or two more that it infuriates and/or offends. It should be noted that there is no on-screen blood over the course of the film’s brisk 94-minute runtime, but only because of how well-known it is that blood was indeed shed, and not justly. Furthermore, by hinging his focus on how ABC Sports charged forward in hopes that they would take a picture of what unfolded, perhaps Fehlbaum will come under fire for focusing so little on those at the scene of the crime and so much on the men and women who dictated its facts to 900 million people from afar. Then again, it has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. What does it mean when the pictures render us speechless? That’s not for Fehlbaum, nor his co-writers or cast, to figure out. To their credit, they don’t try to.
September 5 is currently playing in theaters nationwide courtesy of Paramount.

As a movie, September 5 itself is relatively apolitical, yet I have no doubt that for every viewer it thrills, there will be one or two more that it infuriates and/or offends. It should be noted that there is no on-screen blood over the course of the film’s brisk 94-minute runtime, but only because of how well-known it is that blood was indeed shed, and not justly.
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Will Bjarnar is a writer, critic, and video editor based in New York City. Originally from Upstate New York, and thus a member of the Greater Western New York Film Critics Association and a long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan, Will first became interested in movies when he discovered IMDb at a young age; with its help, he became a voracious list maker, poster lover, and trailer consumer. He has since turned that passion into a professional pursuit, writing for the film and entertainment sites Next Best Picture, InSession Film, Big Picture Big Sound, Film Inquiry, and, of course, Geek Vibes Nation. He spends the later months of each year editing an annual video countdown of the year’s 25 best films. You can find more of his musings on Letterboxd (willbjarnar) and on X (@bywillbjarnar).