more rebelliously, techniques that are familiar from reality-tv, like melodramatic slow motion shots, a digital clock that “ticks” like the 60 Minutes stopwatch, diagrams and maps, gritty-seeming switches from video to film, and a grim narrative voice-over (provided by Michael Douglas, whose flat-nasal tone has never seemed so ideal).

The story is told through two basic narrative lines—one provided by Ankie Spitzer, the Dutch widow of one of the murdered Israelis, fencing coach Arnie Spitzer, the other by Amal Al Gashey, the sole surviving Palestinian guerilla (the others were either killed at the airport in Munich in 1972, or have died at the hands of the Israeli Mossad in the years since). These two people tell their stories—Ankie in full light, poised, articulate, and noble, Amal scruffy by comparison,the Israeli Secret Service, the Chief of Munich Police at the time, and others who recall what happened from various vantage points. These talking heads appear alongside 1972 ABC News footage (in which Jim McKay and Peter Jennings appear increasingly fatigued and distressed), such that the history unfolds with a pulsing, eerie immediacy.

The film pulls together previously undisclosed and well-known information, arguing that East Germans helped the terrorists gain access to the Village (where security was not nearly at the level of today’s Games, in large part because West Germany wanted the Games to showcase its peaceful sophistication, some thirty years after Hitler). The group demanded that 200 Palestinians be released from Israeli jails in exchange for the release of the athletes. But Black September came up against