At a time when world events are instantaneously reported on social media and news sites, it’s an enlightening, altogether gripping experience to watch a film like September 5, which depicts how a dedicated crew at ABC Sports managed to broadcast the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attacks live to an entire nation.

Not only does German director Tim Fehlbaum’s accomplished third feature detail all the logistical hurdles the team needed to scale so they could capture the crisis as it happened, relying on massive TV cameras, smuggled 16mm film stock, a slew of walkie talkies and plenty of ingenuity. Even more importantly, the movie tackles the tough questions faced by several hardworking newsmen — and one vital female translator — as they dealt with a situation in which many human lives hung in the balance.

Those enduring questions, as well as intense, lived-in performances from a terrific cast, help to make September 5 more than just a time capsule about how the news was handled in the pre-digital age; it’s an account that speaks to our time as well.

Flawlessly blending tons of archival footage from September 5, 1972 — a day that now lives in infamy for those who were alive at the time — with uncanny behind-the-scenes creations of the ABC crew working overtime, and then some, to get it all on the air, the film focuses on the key players who fought to make it happen.

They include Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), the ABC executive in charge of broadcasting the ’72 Munich games; Marvin (Ben Chaplin), the team’s smart and testy head of operations; Marianne (Leonie Benesch), a local German translator; and Geoff (John Magaro), a young producer meant to cover an uneventful day of boxing and volleyball, who winds up landing on something much more significant.

Things start off ordinarly enough, with a sleepy TV crew settling in for their shift after a day which saw Mark Spitz famously take home a gold medal in swimming, But then gunshots are heard at the Olympic Village, which is just a few blocks away from ABC’s temporary headquarters. Geoff, who’s been left in charge while the higher-ups take a much-needed day off, soon finds himself doing everything he can to both figure out what’s happening and report it live to viewers back in America.

With the help of Marianne, who goes from being a neglected backroom interpreter to a major field reporter, Geoff and his team quickly realize that a pivotal and possibly world-changing event is under way: Palestinian terrorists, belonging to a group known as Black September, have killed two Israeli athletes and taken nearly a dozen others hostage, asking for the release of hundreds of prisoners in return.

This is all happening, of course, in Germany, at a time when the country was starting to publicly come to terms with the horrors inflicted on Jews during WWII. That history is not easily forgotten by Geoff and the others — especially Marvin, who’s the son of Holocaust victims and holds a major grudge against the Germans he comes into contact with.

Felhbaum, who wrote the script with Moritz Binder, delivers some early exposition about Marvin and the other characters during the film’s opening scenes, which kick off with an exposé depicting the ABC Sports crew at work behind-the-scenes. After that, September 5 quickly becomes a play-by-play account of how the Munich coverage came together, and it’s a riveting one to watch.

Among the many obstacles Geoff faces, one of the main ones involves getting footage of the building where the hostages are being held. Quick on his feet and unafraid to take major risks, he has his team wheel a giant newsroom camera onto a hill outside the office, while a smaller 16mm rig is smuggled — along with star reporter Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) — into a building across the street from the Israeli dormitories under siege.

But that raises another quesiton: How do you get the 16mm footage back out of a zone under police lockdown? Geoff again comes up with a crazy idea, dressing up a crew member (Daniel Adeosun) as a Team U.S.A. athlete and having him sneak back and forth with a few film cans taped to his body. The exposed reels are then developed in an on-site lab, with one of them revealing the infamous black-and-white shots of a masked Black September member lingering outside on the balcony.

September 5 doesn’t skimp on any of the technological details — we also learn that Jennings reported events over a telephone, with the receiving end rigged to a studio mic — but Felhbaum steps back often enough to help viewers see the bigger picture at play.

What happens if Black September winds up executing one of the athletes? Should the team also capture that live on television, possibly broadcasting it back home to the parents of David Berger, an American-born weightlifter competing under the Israeli flag? (The larger Israeli-Palestinian question, however, is never raised in the film, which keeps its eyes glued to events as they unfolded back then.)

Geoff is unsure how to handle things, caught between Marvin, who becomes the crew’s moral beacon, and Roone, who’s constantly fighting both his own network and others — including CBS, with whom they share the only available satellite link — to keep exclusivity over the story. The fact this is all being handled by newsmen more familiar with sports than terrorism adds another layer of intrigue, although September 5 suggests that it’s precisely due to the team’s experience with live events that they were able to succeed so well.

Even if you know how the Munich attacks tragically concluded, the film remains suspenseful to the end, focusing on characters trapped between their desire to accomplish their jobs and their awareness of what’s exactly at stake. Magaro (Past Lives, First Cow) encapsulates that dilemma perfectly — as does the rest of the cast, with talented actress Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge, Babylon Berlin) playing someone in a particularly tough spot, serving as a middleman between the Germans and Americans.

While the equipment back in 1972 was limited to shaky 16mm or gargantuan studio rigs, Fehlbaum and cinematographer Markus Förderer have more gear available to them now, though they keep the camerawork over-the-shoulder and intimate to better focus on the performances. Editor Hansjörg Weissbrich expertly cuts in all the archive news footage from the time, so we only see what was really shot by the ABC Sports crew instead of recreations of those images.

The gritty and naturalistic aesthetic seems worlds away from Fehlbaum’s previous feature, an ambitious sci-fi drama called The Colony. And although the director surely took some liberties with what actually happened inside the ABC newsroom, he never loses his focus on the lasting importance of reporting real, and not fake, news in the most relevant way possible.

Early reactions to Angelina Jolie’s latest movie are signaling the superstar’s triumphant return to the big screen.

Maria, director Pablo Larraín’s new biopic about opera singer Maria Callas, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on Thursday, Aug. 29.

Deadline film critic Stephanie Bunbury described Jolie, 49, as “an almost magical match for the real diva,” in a review of the film.

“The actor’s commitment to this creation is obvious at every turn,” she wrote. “Knowing that Callas was only happy when on stage, she learned to sing for the role; the voice we hear is a blend of Callas and Jolie’s own. Even more importantly, we can see her chest rise and veins swell as she is consumed, body and soul, by the physical and emotional effort of singing.”

The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey praised Jolie’s performance in a review: “It’s a career-defining bit of synchronicity, bolstered by one of Jolie’s very best performances. Her work has always been about that immaculate sense of control over posture and tone.”

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Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman wrote that Jolie “seizes our attention, playing Maria as woman of wiles who is imperious, mysterious, fusing the life force of a genius diva with the downbeat emotional fire of a femme fatale,” in the movie, while expressing some issues with the film as a whole.

“Jolie, for the first time in years, reminds you that she can be a deadly serious actor of commanding subtlety and power,” Gleiberman added.

Writing for the film and television website Little White Lies, Hannah Strong asserted that Jolie has “found the role of a lifetime” in a similar manner to Natalie Portman’s portrayal of Jackie Kennedy in Larraín’s 2016 film Jackie.

“It’s quite something to watch a woman as instantly recognizable as Jolie be so bewitching while playing someone else incredibly famous (always a challenge in biopics where footage of the subject exists) and without the layers of prosthetics that actors normally rely on to ‘transform,’ ” she wrote. “Yet Jolie achieves such with a refined purr of a European accent and something equally feile in her gait.”

Fionnuala Halligan wrote for Screen Daily that the movie exceeds with “a sense of elusiveness and the unexpected even within its familiar structure,” adding, “Larrain leans into Jolie’s aimlessness as she wanders around Paris by creating scenes and memories that take place only in her mind, and adding orchestras which spring to life across the city to usher in ’Madame Butterfly’, for example, in the rain.”

Maria, written by Steven Knight, is the latest in a string of biographical films from director Larraín, 48. His previous Spencer and Jackie featured Oscar-nominated performances from Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana and Portman as the former first lady, respectively. 

“I take very seriously the responsibility to Maria’s life and legacy. I will give all I can to meet the challenge,” Jolie said in a statement when the project was announced in 2022. Callas, who became an international sensation thanks to her three-octave vocal range, died in Paris in 1977 of a heart attack, according to The Guardian.

Maria, also set to screen at the Telluride Film Festival this weekend, does not yet have a release date; Netflix purchased the film’s distribution rights.

In Jackie and Spencer, Pablo Larraín removed any trace of starch from the historical bio-drama to examine, with penetrating intimacy, famous women in moments of extreme emotional distress played out in the glare of a global spotlight. Intimacy is the key factor lacking in the third part of the gifted Chilean director’s unofficial trilogy, Maria. Starring Angelina Jolie as revered operatic soprano Maria Callas over the final week of her life in Paris, the movie is like a glittering jewel in a glass showcase, inviting you to look but not touch.

That doesn’t mean it’s uninvolving or that Jolie’s technically precise interpretation isn’t impressive. But there’s a meta collision between a star whose celebrity has long eclipsed her acting achievements, making it all but impossible for her to disappear into a character, and a subject who constructed an imperious persona for herself, performing even when she wasn’t on a stage.

Doubling down on icons brings a lot of weight for a role to bear. It results less in a kinship between actor and character than a twofold remove — an exercise in character study, a tad glacial and distancing, rather than a flesh-and-blood portrait.

The movie is beautifully crafted, of course, graced with sumptuous visuals from the great Ed Lachman. The cinematographer captures the City of Light in 1977 in soft autumnal shades highly evocative of the period and shifts into black-and-white or grainy color stock for Callas’ many retreats into memory. Lachman, who was Oscar-nominated for his breathtaking chiaroscuro work on Larraín’s last feature, El Conde, shot Maria using a textured mix of 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm, along with vintage lenses.

The DP’s outstanding work enhances the refined contributions of production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. The latter’s stunning gowns include chic ensembles worn at public occasions and exquisite costumes for Callas’ famed stage roles, some of which the singer is seen burning as she separates herself from the past.

“I’m in the mood for adulation,” Callas tells a Paris waiter when he suggests she might be more comfortable inside than at an outdoor café table. “I come to restaurants to be adored.”

Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight, who previously penned Spencer, comply to a degree. Their film is an act of mournful worship for a diva who seems almost too arch, too cloaked in affectation to read as a vulnerable human being — even as her body is shutting down and she’s racked with insecurities about her voice while planning to sing again, more than four years after she last performed. Often, it feels like the filmmakers are scrutinizing Callas with the disorienting effect of a magnifying glass.

The balance doesn’t seem quite right when you feel more for the loyal household staff who love and protect her than you do for the woman lying dead on the carpet by the grand piano. That image opens the movie, preceded only by a slow pan around Callas’ stately apartment.

Knight employs the pedestrian framing device of an interview, with a TV arts reporter and cameraman coming to Maria’s home. The journalist’s name, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee in a thankless role), is a tipoff that he’s a product of Maria’s mind given that it’s also the name of the medication on which she’s most dependent — more commonly sold as Quaaludes in the U.S.

In what seems a ritual maintained for some time, Maria’s hyper-vigilant butler, Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino), removes the pills from her dressing table and later from the handbags and coat pockets where she has stashed handfuls of them around the room. She has also stopped eating for days at a time, feeding meals prepared by her housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) to her poodles.

She becomes peevish about the dire warnings of her medic, Dr. Fointainebleau (Vincent Macaigne), that her heart and liver are completely shot and that the stress of attempting to perform plus the meds she would need to get through it risk killing her.

The dominant thread becomes not that grim final week, punctuated by abortive rehearsals with a gently coaxing accompanist (Stephen Ashfield), but the singer’s mental forays into her past, from her unhappy childhood with an exploitative mother (Lydia Koniordou) through her love affair with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), whose aggressive charms instantly shoved her husband to the sidelines. Since the Greek shipping magnate eventually left her for Jackie Kennedy, there’s a satisfying full-circle completion with the subject of Larraín’s first film in the trilogy. But don’t expect a cameo from Jackie star Natalie Portman.

Maria’s memories are additionally crowded with her triumphs in the world’s most prestigious opera houses — Covent Garden, The Met, La Scala — flooding the movie with glorious music. The naked emotionality and piercing tragedy of the immortal operatic heroines is a poignant fit for Callas’ end-of-life story and a useful counterpoint to her studied poise and aloofness in this interpretation. The power of work by Verdi, Puccini, Bellini, Donizetti, Catalani and Cherubini goes a long way toward delivering the pathos that often seems muted by Larraín’s approach.

Passages from some of the most celebrated classical operas effectively supplant the role of a score. The soul-stirring choice of musical bookends for the film starts with Desdemona’s supplicant prayer, “Ave Maria,” from Otello, and closes with “Vissi d’Arte” from Tosca, in which a woman who lived for art and love feels abandoned by God. Opera enthusiasts will find much here to savor when the movie drops on Netflix at a date to be determined.

Commendably, Jolie undertook more than six months of rigorous vocal training for the part, also working on breathing and posture alongside specifics like accent. The singing we hear in Maria is a synthesized mix of star and subject. Arias from her prime are predominantly Callas recordings, but her voice in the 1977 scenes, older and rustier after years of vocal strain and a long absence from the stage, blends in a significant amount of Jolie. Neither lip-syncing nor karaoke, it’s a more intricate hybrid.

A number of striking moments use music to show memory and fantasy bleeding into Callas’ diminishing hold on reality. For instance, Maria strolling through the city with the Eiffel Tower in the background, in her mind marshaling a crowd of everyday Parisians singing the “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore; or a full orchestra on the steps of one of the French capital’s grand historic buildings, playing in the rain while a throng of costumed geishas perform the “Humming Chorus” from Madama Butterfly. That ineffably moving passage of music, representing Butterfly’s calm vigil as she waits for Pinkerton’s return, adds emotional heft to the tragedy looming in Maria’s life.

Conflict surfaces when a music reporter for Le Figaro pulls a dirty trick and then confronts Maria outside the rehearsal auditorium with the view that her voice is irreparably ragged. But Knight’s script doesn’t capitalize on this as a moment of self-reckoning, instead limiting the scene to a distressing invasion of privacy.

The movie aims to depict a celebrated woman, whose life has been as much about sacrifice as reward, seeking to take control, to look back and see the truth as death approaches. But its moments of illumination are hazy. There’s little that comes close to the compassion and insight Larraín brought to his portraits of Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, even though it’s very much of a piece with those movies.

The tenderness of a scene in which Maria’s sister (Valeria Golino) urges her to put her troubled childhood behind her (“Close the door, little sister”) inadvertently points up how few opportunities we are given to get on comparably intimate terms with the protagonist.

In fact, the most heartbreaking moment for me came at the end, when the film returns to the day of Callas’ death from a heart attack, aged just 53. A high-pitched shriek that at first sounds like some strangled note from an aria is revealed to have come from one of her poodles, the dog’s cry of anguish becoming a loud expression of the hushed sorrow shown by Ferruccio and Bruna (Favino and Rohrwacher are both wonderful) as they reach for each other’s hand for comfort.

Still, Maria is a far more daring and unconventional take on the final chapter of the legendary soprano’s life than Franco Zeffirelli’s boilerplate 2002 biopic, Callas Forever, starring Fanny Ardant. And Larraín’s film becomes retroactively more affecting when the lovely archival images of Callas over the end credits, full of vitality at the peak of her career, widen the perspective on her sad, accelerated decline.