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Munich
Universal Pictures / DreamWorks Distribution LLC


7.0

based on 39 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 198 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for strong graphic violence, some sexual content, nudity and language

Starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Ciarán Hinds, Hanns Zischler, and Mathieu Kassovitz

Steven Spielberg directs an international cast in Munich, a gripping suspense thriller set in the aftermath of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munch Olympics. This dramatic exploration inspired by true events follows a secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and kill the 11 Palestinians suspected to have planned the Munich attack -- and the personal toll this mission of revenge takes on the team and the man who led it. (Universal Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Tony Kushner George Jonas (book Vengeance)
DIRECTED BY:	Steven Spielberg
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: May 9, 2006 Theatrical: December 23, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	164 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

Received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director (Spielberg).

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Newsweek David Ansen

A superbly taut and well-made thriller that jumps from Geneva to Rome, from Paris to Beirut, from Athens to Brooklyn, each lethal assignment staged with a mastery Hitchcock might envy.

100

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Munich, Steven Spielberg's spectacularly gripping and unsettling new movie, is a grave and haunted film, yet its power lies in its willingness to be a work of brutal excitement.

100

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Masterful, atypically political - and flawlessly acted.

100

ReelViews James Berardinelli

A film of uncommon depth, intelligence, and sensitivity.

100

Premiere Glenn Kenny

This lengthy, nuance-filled story about how eye-for-an-eye stuff differs from theory to practice is one of the most considered, thoughtful, and involving movies of its kind.

100

Slate David Edelstein

Munich is the most potent, the most vital, the best movie of the year.

100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

As a thriller, Munich is efficient, absorbing, effective. As an ethical argument, it is haunting.

100

Empire Ian Nathan

This is Spielberg operating at his peak - an exceptionally made, provocative and vital film for our times.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Some will find the surprise pleasant, others unpleasant. Whatever it is, it's the least commercial, most somberly heartfelt movie ever made by the cinema's most commercially successful filmmaker.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Breaking from the Spielberg oeuvre, Munich isn't a particularly hopeful movie, but it's a fair and morally dignified one.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Munich's even-handed cry for peace is not an act of equivocation but one of bravery. What Munich has to say, and its ability to say it to the widest possible audience, couldn't be more needed than it is right now.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

A mesmerizing, richly nuanced inquiry into Israel's revenge of the Munich massacre of its athletes.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

For those who only recall Bana from his bland showing as Ang Lee's super-thyroidial meltdown monster, his performance here is a revelation.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The director can work wonders within his celluloid universe, but when the time comes to hand us back to reality, he stumbles. With this movie, that hurts.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

If Munich raises disturbing issues about Jewish-Arab relations, past and present - and how can it not? - it is also an absolutely riveting tale of the hunt and the hunted.

USA Today Mike Clark

This is a smart and often tense work whose ultimate merit isn't completely calculable now.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The thorny heart of Steven Spielberg's sober, fact-based political thriller about Israeli retaliation for the murder of 11 Olympic athletes by Palestinian terrorists is the knowledge that vengeance is a self-perpetuating murder machine that drags successive generations into a mire of tit-for-tat bloodshed.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Bana is magnificent in the role.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

More than anything, Munich is a slammin' entertainment filled with dazzling set pieces and geometric camerawork.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Would you feel anxiety or remorse if you pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden, however satisfying or even necessary it might be? Munich argues that finding him in our rifle sights would leave any of us a different person.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

With its protracted storytelling, its fuzzy philosophizing and its less-than-compelling leading man, it's far less gripping than the subject matter deserves.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

As a piece of filmmaking, Munich is rarely less than gripping. As a political essay, as a brief against despair, it is far less convincing.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

An unlovable movie. It's morally ambiguous, which means there's no real rooting interest. It's episodic, with the same kinds of episodes repeated over and over, so there's little sense of forward motion. It feels philosophically and politically confused, so there's no message to take from it.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Munich is at best a muddled prayer for peace whose weakness stems not from its politics but from the misconception of its main character. Avner is not just a fictional character, but an absurdly improbable expression of Spielbergian schmaltz.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Munich is both astonishing and frustrating. It's not easy to tell how much of the tone comes directly from Spielberg and how much comes from Kushner, who was called in to polish the script after Roth completed it.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Even if it wasn't exactly historically accurate (the film is only "inspired by true events," after all), innocents are killed in the crossfire all the time when these kinds of missions are undertaken, and it's a cop-out for Spielberg to pretend otherwise.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Munich is a Spielberg film for better and worse, a vivid, sometimes simplistic thriller in which action speaks louder than ideas.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's a brutal, merciless, somber picture, utterly devoid of the heart-tugging sentimentality that always creeps into even his best films.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The failure of a movie that is so good in so many ways leaves me to wonder if Spielberg is up to this kind of complex, multi-tasking story.

Chicago Tribune Allison Benedikt

It's when Spielberg stops trying to think so hard that Munich works best. Though some of the assassination scenes feel a little too choreographed, more "West Side Story" than "Bourne Identity."

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It seems almost disrespectful to weave in a provocative re-creation of the killings -- somehow a massacre of unarmed innocents that shocked the world should be more than just fodder for ginning up the tension at the end of a commercial movie.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Beautifully made pic will spur newsy media coverage and possible consternation on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, but members of the general public will be glancing at their watches rather than having epiphanies about world peace.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

If he had told the story straight, without such hedging, and at half the length, it would have borne far more conviction.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

I cannot remember a moment in this new film that compares, simply in directorial originality, to the work in "Schindler's List."

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Bouncing about from one flawed movie to another, Steven Spielberg has lost his way of late, and Munich finds him more disoriented than ever.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

The film is sluggish and repetitive, yet it exerts a certain clinical fascination.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Munich may have value as an act of expiation but not as entertainment or art.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Munich is so broad-stroke it cuts itself at every turn. It's also a thoroughly lifeless movie.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

It's too turgid and redundant to have any real impact. As a thriller, it barely thrills; as a lecture, it has nothing new to say.

The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 198 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Colm B gave it a4:
Too long, shot in constant darkness and not something I'd recommend.

Sats S. gave it an8:
I really liked the movie, now i have a projects to do on the film techniques used in this movie, can anybody help me out?

T. M. gave it a4:
I recall that this film was nominated for best picture in the 2006 Oscar season. It was only nominated only because Spielberg can do no wrong in Hollywood, because this film is NOT best picture material at all. Repetitive, manipulative, overlong, hard to follow, muddled, unpleasant, sickening, and just not good at all. BTW, Lance (the person who loved the death scene of the female assassin), you are a real sicko. That was probably the most tasteless scene in a movie full of tasteless scenes. Did you revel in the image of her descrated body after the older guy pulled off the cover Eric Bana's character had draped over her? You have truly become desensitized by movies like this, if that's the case. Spielberg has lost it with this one.

Sean P. gave it a10:
I'm very surprised this film didn't even make it to the 80s, especially with all the 100s it got from critics. But just consider this: it's very rare for Beraldinelli, Ebert, EW, and Empire to ALL give the same film a perfect score (it's hard for Beraldinelli and Empire to give a 100, period). Just this fact alone managed to make me ignore the rest of the critics who brought the film down to 74, and I watched it in the theaters anyway (something i usually only reserve for 75+ films). And yes, I agreed with all those 100s. It's one of Spielberg's best films, and that's saying a lot. You just need to be patient with it, not like, say, Jurassic Park.

Brabara M. gave it a9:
Thought provoking. Attempts to show that there is more than one side to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For every Israeli explanation for the current violence there is an equally convincing Palestiniian explanation. What's fascinating is that the explanations are the same.

Lance gave it a5:
Not bad...not great. It was a little hard to follow at times. I did like the fact that Steven wanted to show the depth of the problem. Often the definition of terrorist depends upon the point of view of the name-caller. <***SPOILER***> The best death scene by far had to of been that of the female, Dutch assassin. How many times do you (a) see a female assassin and (b) see her get what's coming to her. Very cool.

Tregenza gave it a4:
This is not a film about Munich, its a film about Sept 11 and how should a civalised society response to terrorist attacks. Unforunently it spends too much time on school boy moralising over the rights or wrongs of assinations and yet misses a key moral point of the whole Munich story. The Isreali assasins killed an innocent man after mistaking him for a terrorist.

Munich Universal Pictures / DreamWorks Distribution LLC

Munich
Universal Pictures / DreamWorks Distribution LLC