This chilling film about the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics won this year's Oscar for best documentary, and rightly so.
Director Kevin Macdonald splices interviews with those connected to the killings - officials, bereaved families, and the last surviving terrorist - together with archive footage and computer-generated imagery of the final, bungled rescue bid, to produce a true-life, ticking-clock thriller which is as compulsive as it is harrowing.
The German authorities were shamefully unprepared and clumsy in dealing with the crisis; the terrorists and the Israeli government were equally intractable; and the Olympic Committee showed supreme insensitivity by letting the "Olympics of Peace and Joy" continue while lives hung in the balance. Macdonald's emotive use of music and his juxtaposition of jarring images foster a slight sense of unease, but they also make this thorough and unsettling work feel like a genuine big-screen event, rather than a jumped-up TV project.
One Day
Cert: 12A
