Popular reviews

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  Review by James (Schaffrillas) ★★★½

  Good movie but could not take the, uh, climax seriously

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★½ 3

  "You could have a kitchen like this someday. It costs dearly. Home always does."

  Not sure why, but this has always registered as a forgettable Spielberg movie in my mind. Maybe because it's not held up as a legend for any of its stars, or blockbuster potential, or awards recognition, or any sort of extra-textual element that would have pinned it to any sort of cultural phenomenon. Finally watching it, I understand even less why this isn't heralded as one of Spielberg's best– it's so grimy and dour and miserable and so so incredibly paranoid, just absolutely teeming with paranoia that bleeds right out of the frame and into my bones.

  Avner is given a task, a "duty," in a…

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  Review by nickusen 1

  the most depressing of the ocean’s eleven films

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 4

  85

  A world without reason - Spielberg, from the first 'revenge' murder, lingers on the faces of both sides. In each account, it doesn't get easier, but the motions become familiar, and Spielberg's dollies, zooms, one-ers etc. are jolting in a formulaic sense; moral muddiness in a constant loop, rising and climaxing, blurring the lines of routine and passion. Basically two hours of Spielberg showing off and yet he confines his skill to a narrative of accomplishment inherently tied to atrocity, with each off-the-cuff set-piece concluding with panache while the images spill with blood and fire, silence and annihilated bodies. That the film's distinct focus on sex - the characters' lack of it and the safety it can provide - is perverted by violence and trauma speaks to the collective pain which clouds up and rains down during the simplest, most primal of moments between people. When bloodshed is currency, there's no other way to pay.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

  "Every one of the ones who died, died wanting this."

  everyone understands the mere futility of revenge but this wants to know how to live truthfully, even just to sit down to dinner or sleep with your wife, alongside the collective guilt of every violent act, if that is perhaps itself a moral compromise.

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★ 4

  on the one hand, a very angry and disillusioned portrayal of losing your faith in government and nation following acts of state sanctioned violence. on the other, an exploration of "they made us do this" instead of a true depiction of the reasons why Black September happened, what the Palestinian people experience to this day under the Israeli regime and a work that's still too enamoured with Israel's "right to exist" to dismantle it in the way it should be. Spielberg is obviously torn between the love of what he considers the homeland and the actions of violence taken by Mossad, but there's never any humanisation of the people his characters are sent to kill, any understanding of why these…

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½ 5

  The horrors of our barbaric, pre-modern worlds most essential mechanical law: cause-and-effect. Unsurprisingly, the films original title was Vengeance. Spielberg isn't interested in picking a side - he wants to show you the cycle. "We just want a home," isn't a zero-sum statement, it rather calls attention to the fact that Avner's side wants the same thing, and only a moment after this frank yet cordial conversation these two men will attempt to kill each other once their nationalist difference and its corresponding conflicts are established. And it's no coincidence that "home" is a topic that comes up throughout the work, whether it be Israeli or Palestinian, the place where ones family is fed, where one goes to rest. Munich…

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½

  movie is about making fattoush salad with your good friends on study abroad

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  Review by Will Sloan

  First viewing since Boxing Day 2005, when I was 16. Probably the toughest Spielberg joint. This is the one you point to when you want to prove that he doesn’t just do treacle and happy endings, like how you might say “Hey, Paul McCartney can rock, check out Helter Skelter.” I like that after 2.5 hours of intrigue and killing, we end up in a world that is definitively a worse place than it was at the start. This separates Munich from other “grown up” Spielberg movies about historical atrocities like Amistad and Schindler’s List, which tend to focus on the heroic figures who helped stop the madness. Pretty funny this opened wide on Christmas, I mean it’s a downer!

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  Review by anna nomaly ★★★★★ 2

  West side story.

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  Review by David Chen ★★★★½ 3

  “You could have a kitchen like this someday. It costs dearly, but home always does.”

  This movie is nonstop. A thrilling collection of set pieces whose overall effect is to show the human cost of an endless cycle of bloodshed. 

  The thing I took away the most on this viewing was the juxtaposition of middle class bourgeois existence with the machinery of death. Towards the beginning of the film, Geoffrey Rush’s character briefs Avner on who he is to kill and how he is to do it, all while walking along a peaceful seaside beach with children playing in front of them. In many of the characters’ minds, one leads to the other — the pleasantness we all take for granted exists because people dare to sacrifice for their country. 

  The military and state apparatus insist that only through killing can your home finally be secured. The question this movie asks, quite hauntingly: What if it’s not?

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★★ 5

  (The Average Joe’s Movie Club Cast Episode 13)

  Steven Spielberg's thrilling and emotional depiction of the tragic on-going cycle of violence associated with the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.

  "We are supposed to be righteous. That's a beautiful thing. And we're losing it. If I lose that, that's everything. That's my soul."

  Watching Munich this time was a pretty fresh and engaging experience, since this is the rare movie I remembered very little about since seeing it in the theater. The story begins by establishing the horrific events of the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where Israeli athletes were killed by the terrorist group Black September. After that, the movie transitions into an espionage thriller as a team of covert…