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During the 1972 Munich Olympics, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were kidnapped and murdered by an extremist PLO faction called Black September. Director Kevin Macdonald pieces together those events in an energized documentary that calls itself a thriller. Some have found his fast-paced, emotional look at the massacre shallow, but that misses the point. Macdonald recreates the incredible tension and horror of that September day, and he uncovers, for the first time, the incompetence of the German officials, who, like the rest of the world, were caught off-guard by this new form of international violence. You won’t get an in-depth understanding of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but you will feel the anguish and frustration that turned the Olympics Of Peace And Joy into the Olympics Of Terror.
