When it came to the snubs on the recent Oscars shortlist, this excellent docudrama received just one nomination - Best Original Screenplay - when it deserved a handful. It also deserves to be seen by the widest audience possible.
We don't realise how much of the world that we now experience can be traced back to September 5, 1972 - the date of the Munich Olympics massacre that saw 11 members of the Israeli team and a West German police officer killed. Five of the hostage-takers were shot dead during the failed rescue attempt.
As the overnight shifts change in the TV control room for the sports crew from US broadcaster ABC, armed members of the Palestinian militant organisation Black September storm the Olympic Village, killing two members of the Israeli Olympic team and taking nine others hostage.
Still on air, the ABC crew, led in the control room by Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), decide to follow the story. Mason's boss, ABC Sports president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), backs the decision.
Through a combination of risk-taking, ego, ingenuity, and luck, and with the help of local translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), Mason keeps the live broadcast going across the globe while Arledge faces down his news colleagues' attempts to take over, telling everyone in Munich and back home that this is "our story".
Watch: Ben Chaplin and Peter Sarsgaard discuss making September 5.
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As the crisis continues, Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), ABC Sports' head of operations, warns Mason and Arledge of the dangers in what they are now transmitting. "They know the whole world is watching," he says. "If they shoot someone on live television, who's story is that? Is it ours or is it theirs?"
This is relentless filmmaking from Swiss director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum, where the audience doesn't get the chance to catch their breath as the questions keep coming - on screen and off. It's a superbly acted ensemble piece that rarely leaves the confines of the control room and, in terms of dynamics, owes much to Paul Greengrass's September 11 hijacking film, United 93. Eerily, September 5 begins with ABC Sports' Olympics opening credits featuring The Twin Towers.
A fascinating companion film to Kevin Macdonald's Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September and Steven Spielberg's aftermath thriller Munich, September 5 is about that day, based around the actual broadcast footage, and not about the tragedy that has unfolded ever since.
Once again, you find yourself watching a film where you know what the conclusion will be come 90 minutes but still hope somehow that it will be different - the power of cinema demonstrated once again, this time in a disturbing must-see.
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