THE 1972 Olympic Games were supposed to herald ‘a starting point for a peaceful post-war West Germany,’ we’re told as September 5 (12A) opens, but when 11 Israeli athletes are taken hostage in the Olympic village by the Palestinian Black September group, the positive tone quickly lurches into panic.
The story is told through the lens of the American ABC Sports team, led by Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin).
A well-oiled machine when it comes to reporting on sports, the team has zero experience when it comes to covering an unfolding news story of this magnitude.
Factor in the potential for tragedy and you have an incredibly tense drama.
The ABC team effectively has to invent the concept of global rolling news from its cramped studio, all the while being threatened with having the story taken away from them and under pressure from the competition.
Written by Moritz Binder, Alex David, and Tim Fehlbaum, with Fehlbaum directing, the film is a claustrophobic affair that brilliantly conveys the on-the-fly nature of the operation, especially the mistakes they make.
Lugging a camera out of the studio to a point overlooking the apartment block where the athletes are being held, for example, the team is delighted to have made a technical breakthrough, only for it to be pointed out that the Palestinians are very likely watching the same pictures on TV.
Markus Förderer’s off-kilter cinematography and Hansjorg Weissbrich’s kinetic editing add considerably to the sense of barely controlled chaos, while the TV pictures are superbly recreated to accentuate the period detail.
As riveting as it is heartbreaking, this is a terrific exploration of the ethics and morality of broadcasting.
- Bring Them Down
- ★★★☆☆
- In cinemas
Bring Them Down (15A) stars Christopher Abbott as Michael, a sheep farmer in the West of Ireland struggling to make ends meet.
Michael runs afoul of his neighbours Gary (Paul Ready) and Jack (Barry Keoghan), when suspicions of sheep-rustling escalate into a bloody feud, with tensions sharpened by the presence of Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), once Michael’s sweetheart and now Gary’s wife.
Written and directed by Chris Andrews, the story opens as a contemporary Irish Western before exploding into a full-blown Greek tragedy, with much of the tit-for-tat violence inspired by Michael’s incapacitated but fiery father, Ray (Colm Meaney).
Nick Cooke’s cinematography makes superb use of the bleak rural backdrop and there are good performances from Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan (if you ever encounter Barry Keoghan in a rural Irish village, drop everything and run), but the story itself doesn’t quite deliver on its initial promise.
- Dog Man
- ★★★★☆
- In cinemas
Adapted from Dav Pilkey’s series of best-selling children’s books, Dog Man (PG) is an animation from the Dreamworks stable (kennel?) that opens with police officer Knight and his faithful dog Greg surviving a bomb planted by ‘the world’s most evilest cat’ Petey (voiced by Pete Davison).
Alas, Knight’s head and Greg’s body have been so badly injured that the only solution is to stitch Greg’s head onto Knight’s body — and so the crime-fighting ‘supa cop’ Dog Man (Peter Hastings) is born (strength: loyalty; weakness: terrified of vacuum cleaners).
Lightning quick in its pacing, joyfully irreverent in tearing up the storytelling conventions, Dog Man is tremendous fun and delightfully bonkers; not only does our hybrid hero have to contend with Petey and his plans for world domination, there’s also Lil’ Petey (Petey’s adorable baby clone, who adopts Dog Man as his dad), Floppy the Evil Fish, and a small army of monstrous mobile buildings.
Good fun for young and old, this might even have the most reading-resistant of kids rushing out to find the nearest bookstore.