Director: Steven Spielberg
Year Released: 2005
Rating: 3.5
After the assassination of several Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the Nation of Israel dispatches assassins to take out those responsible. To be brutally honest, it says pretty much the same exact thing as Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven - there are no easy answers in the Israel-Palestine conflict - but Spielberg (along with screenwriters Eric Roth and Tony Kuschner) also make a point of how savagery on both sides only begets more savagery and in that this picture has more to offer on the nature of violence in society than Cronenberg's inexplicably lauded A History of Violence (Cronenberg is a quirky Canadian instead of a super mogul and therefore the critical community has less of a grudge to bear against him). As with a lot of Spielberg's other films of late, it's protracted and embellished, but his gifts as a filmmaker are almost unparalleled - he is as skilled as Hitchcock in building tension, creating a mood, generating memorable performances from his cast and keeping the audience captivated, plus he's not afraid to show things of a graphic nature in order to accurately depict the brutal realism of the situation. When you walk away from his film, the last thing you want to do is fight.
