'September 5' review: a blinkered, noncommittal thriller about an Olympic hostage crisis

September 5 is a re-telling of the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis, and as a journalistic retrospective about TV broadcasting.

The movie's narrow focus is almost entirely confining the plot to the real-time developments within ABC 's Munich newsroom.

The ethics of breakneck TV decision-making and the media's role in capturing the affair, which took place over 20 hours , play out in rote fashion.

The claustrophobia and urgency of a newsroom can make for engaging storytelling, but the film adheres to the same limitations the reporters were constrained by at the time.

September 5 is aesthetically malformed, but in capturing its chronology, the film presents little difference between a cut within the same scene and a cut that skips forward several minutes .

September 5 runs a hair over 90 minutes , but this time is better spent watching Kevin Macdonald 's Oscar -winning documentary on the same subject, One Day in September , which is made up of archival footage pulled from numerous sources, rather than locking itself to one perspective that isn't particularly interesting or enlightening to begin with. September 5 was reviewed out of its Philadelphia Film Festival premiere. It opens in theaters Nov. 29 . Topics Film.