BRIAN VINER reviews September 5: Drama behind first ever live broadcast of a terror attack

Verdict: Taut thriller. Rating:. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, 1941 ‘a date which will live in infamy’. Tragically, the calendar now has quite a few more of them, including the one chronicled in an excellent documentary-style thriller, simply titled September 5. That was the Tuesday during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich when 11 members of the Israeli team ended up dead, after being taken hostage by Palestinian ‘Black September’ terrorists who threatened to kill one every hour unless their demands (of a wholesale release of prisoners from Israeli prisons) were met.

The story has been told before, both as documentary (Kevin Macdonald’s brilliant 1999 Oscar-winner One Day In September) and as drama (Steven Spielberg’s disappointingly turgid 2005 film Munich, which focused more on the Israeli mission, over the ensuing months and years, to assassinate all those responsible for the massacre). This time, director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum looks at the shocking events of that day 53 years ago entirely from the perspective of the US television network ABC, whose team was in West Germany to deliver a purely sporting narrative yet found itself at the heart of the first terrorist outrage to be broadcast live across the world. ABC’s transmission was apparently seen by more people than, three years earlier, had watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

With a busy hand-held camera and a grainy texture to the pictures, as well as the insertion of actual archive footage, Fehlbaum very cleverly evokes both the chaos of the hostage crisis and the technological primitivism, compared with now, of the era. Tim Fehlbaum looks at the shocking events of that day 53 years ago entirely from the perspective of the US television network ABC. With a busy hand-held camera and a grainy texture to the pictures, as well as the insertion of actual archive footage, Fehlbaum very cleverly evokes both the chaos of the hostage crisis and the technological primitivism, compared with now, of the era.

The casting is spot-on. John Magaro is terrific as nervy but resourceful producer Geoffrey Mason, with Peter Sarsgaard as classy as ever as taciturn ABC Sports supremo Roone Arledge (pictured) determined to keep the broadcast from being commandeered by the network’s News division. We see history being recorded from a desperately cramped studio in which the air-conditioning has failed, with sweat pouring off everyone, while screen graphics are painstakingly assembled by hand.

The casting is spot-on. John Magaro is terrific as nervy but resourceful producer Geoffrey Mason, with Peter Sarsgaard as classy as ever as taciturn ABC Sports supremo Roone Arledge, determined to keep the broadcast from being commandeered by the network’s News division. Ben Chaplin plays ABC’s head of operations Marvin Bader, with German actress Leonie Benesch as a fictionalised character but a useful one: a production assistant roped in as an interpreter.

With impressive sleight of hand, Fehlbaum makes it look as if the backroom team are in dialogue with the real-life presenters Jim McKay and Peter Jennings. Even though we know how the story ends, the film, at a compellingly taut 95 minutes, is heart-thumpingly tense throughout and a deserving Oscar nominee for Best Original Screenplay. There’s a startling moment when the ABC crew realise that the terrorists, too, are watching their live pictures of German police moving in on the apartment in the Olympic Village where the athletes are being held. And it’s all so authentic that we later feel their exhilaration when word arrives that the hostages, after being transported to a nearby airfield, have all been saved. Alas, it is not so.

The modern-day parallels with all this are stark, of course. But Fehlbaum and his co-writer Moritz Binder wisely make no attempt to force them on the audience. Indeed, at the start of the film, before the alarming sound of distant gunfire changes everything, we hear Arledge insisting that the painful spectre of the Holocaust should be raised in an interview with America’s multiple gold-medallist, Jewish swimmer Mark Spitz. So, if anything, we are encouraged to do the same as the protagonists, and contemplate not the future but the past. September 5 is a very skilled and concise piece of storytelling.

Verdict: Modern-day Irish 'Western'. Bring Them Down sees neighbouring sheep farmers are locked in a feud. Bring Them Down is another thriller, also nicely done, yet its setting could hardly be more different than that of September 5. In the beautiful west of Ireland, two neighbouring sheep farmers are locked in a feud, which intensifies when one starts mutilating the other’s rams. To ramp up emotions further, one farmer is an incomer from the north, married to the ex-girlfriend of the other, a Gaelic-speaking local.