Movie Reviews
September 5 Is Almost Nauseatingly Suspenseful
Peter Sarsgaard captures the right pitch for this type of role: a soft-spoken single-mindedness that can quickly shift to outrage or bewilderment.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event. The violent standoff at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which saw the Palestinian terror group Black September take a group of Israeli athletes hostage — an incident that resulted in the shocking deaths of all the captives and most of the captors — has been well documented on film, most notably in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated 2005 drama Munich. Fehlbaum returns to the event via its on-the-ground transmission: the ABC sports team that, while providing round-the-clock live coverage of the Olympics that year, suddenly found itself in one of the biggest, most dramatic news events of its time.
This approach is filled with potential pitfalls. At heart it’s kind of an underdog story, about sports guys, chroniclers of the frivolous, punching above their weight when given the opportunity. Make it too much of one, however, and you undermine the deadly gravity of the situation. At one point, network headquarters suggests to ABC sports chief Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) that they let the news team handle this one, and he refuses; his guys found the story, they have access to the satellite link, and they’re the ones on the ground. Sarsgaard, who gave his greatest performance more than two decades ago in another true-life journalism drama, Shattered Glass, once again captures the right pitch for this type of role: a soft-spoken single-mindedness that can quickly shift to outrage or bewilderment as the situation demands. You can imagine this guy, with those seemingly kind eyes that also look like they could slice right through you, leading a newsroom. (The actor, who won the Volpi Cup at Venice last year for Memory, probably deserves a bit more recognition these days as one of the best we’ve got.)
The movie stays largely within the confines of ABC’s remote studio in Munich, which Fehlbaum and his crew have scrupulously re-created, reportedly down to the tiniest details. Its dark, cramped corridors and control rooms absorb the sinister mood of the events happening outside; every decision begins to feel like a life-and-death matter, even though in many of these cases it’s just journalists and technicians pressing buttons and saying words. Much of the suspense derives from the ways that the studio crew, led by Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), figures out how to cover the unfolding story, from tapping into radio frequencies being used by the police to dressing up a crew member as an athlete so he can smuggle canisters of film in and out of the now-cordoned-off Olympic Village. At 94 minutes, the film races by, but it also demonstrates a patience and fascination with the process — with the whirr of tape reels, the tangle of cables, the lumbering weight of cameras — that enhances the tension. By focusing so intently on this particular group of people covering this broader event, Fehlbaum finds his way into an otherwise pre-determined drama. We know what happened at Munich, yet we find ourselves living through the events as if their outcome was unwritten.
The film also takes on the quality of a conjuring. Fehlbaum has also remained ruthlessly faithful to the facts, interweaving acres of real, contemporaneous television footage with this modern-day reconstruction, so that his actors are interacting with actual images from the era. When they talk to the legendary sportscaster Jim McKay, we’re seeing the actual McKay (who died in 2008) as if he were responding in real time; when an Israeli athlete who got away from the kidnappers comes into the studio for an interview, we’re seeing the real guy. That may not sound like such a dramatic aesthetic gambit, but the incorporation is so thorough, so constant, that the movie starts to feel like a conversation with the past. Which it is: We forget, perhaps, that the presence of Israeli athletes at Munich was a big deal in 1972, just a generation and a half removed from World War II, in a landscape where the shadow of the Holocaust still loomed large.
Of course, September 5 comes at a time when it’s bound to become part of another conversation, about what’s currently happening in Palestine. The film serves as an important reminder that civilians have died on both sides of this conflict for decades — that nobody anywhere, really, has a monopoly on the murder of innocents. And while September 5 was filmed before the events of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent attack on the Gaza Strip and beyond, the filmmakers didn’t walk into this guilelessly; the struggle in the Middle East might sometimes exit the news cycle, especially in the U.S., but it’s been an ongoing debacle for most of our lifetimes.
The hermetically sealed quality of Fehlbaum’s film perhaps prevents us from reading too much into it about contemporary politics — or maybe it invites us to read whatever we want. But of course, such a framing can itself reveal the real-time political machinery of a historical event. Within this heated environment, we see how attitudes and language become codified. At one point, there’s even an internal conversation about whether to refer to the Black September captors as “terrorists.” We know how that one turned out. September 5 reminds us — as did Munich, as does No Other Land, for that matter — that it’s the drip, drip, drip of small, seemingly minor decisions and actions that wind up determining how we see, experience, and understand history.
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Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
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