September 5 (2024) and The Teachers' Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer - 2023)

It's been almost two months since I watched September 5, but I remember I liked a lot this tense retelling of the 1972 hostage crisis at the Munich Olympic Games, told from the perspective of the ABC-TV Sports crew. Peter Sarsgaard stars as ABC Sports President Roone Arledge, John Magaro is control room head Geoffrey Mason, Ben Chaplin is operations head Marvin Bader, and Leonie Benesch is their German translator. They're all terrific and the movie is a true-to-life thriller under the direction of Tim Fehlbaum. The Oscar-nominated script was co-written by Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David. As it happens, Fehlbaum is Swiss, Binder is German, and David is American. The movie is primarily in English. Here's some history from britannica.com on the actual events.

Composer Lorenz Dangel's exciting score can be streamed on Apple Music and probably elsewhere.

After seeing it I made a note about enjoying the old technology in the TV studio, e.g. turning videotape by hand for slow motion and manually placing letters on a board for on-screen captions.

Sarsgaard was last blogged for The Lost Daughter, Magaro for Past Lives, and Chaplin for Me and Orson Welles. 

Benesch starred in The Teachers' Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer - 2023), a German movie which I did see and loved and forgot to write about at the time. Because I'm so far behind in blogging, I'll summarize it right now. In that one, directed and co-written by Ilker Çatak and co-written by Johannes Duncker, Benesch plays a first year high school teacher trying to solve a theft at her school. It has a number of twists and was nominated for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Rated 96% by critics and 90 by audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, it can be streamed now on Netflix. Benesch was also in dozens of other movies, including The White Ribbon, and TV series, including three of The Crown.  

September 5 is the fourth feature directed and co-written by Fehlbaum, the third co-written by Binder, and the writing debut of David. Dangel has composed 22 other features, including two of Fehlbaum's previous three.

I saw it March 11 on an airplane with a download from Paramount+. Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences give it gold medals, with scores of 93 and 90%.