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Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Prime Video adds two underrated 2024 movies that I love and you need to watch right now
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. To me, the best part of streaming are that great movies and TV shows that may not have made a splash upon their initial release for whatever reason can get a second chance to find an audience. This week I'm hoping we get two examples of that as two of the better movies I saw at the tail end of last year but weren't able to crack through against the likes of Gladiator 2, Wicked and more, land on Prime Video — September 5 and The Fire Inside. Both movies arrived on the streaming service on May 27 and both should be added to your watchlist real quick. September 5 was one of the best movies of 2024 that I saw, while The Fire Inside is a winning crowd-pleaser sports movie that goes deeper than others in the genre. Let's start with September 5, a journalism thriller that follows the ABC Sports broadcast crew of the 1972 Olympics that find themselves in the middle of the story of their lives when the Munich hostage situation takes place. Tim Fehlbaum directed and co-wrote the movie, which takes place almost entirely in the broadcast room of ABC Sports, using archival footage of the actual event to chronicle the story. The movie also features an outstanding ensemble that consists of John Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard, Ben Chaplin and breakout star Leonie Benesch. My September 5 review gave the movie five stars, as not only is it a gripping thriller (I was hooked to see how everything unfolded despite the fact that the event happened more than 50 years ago), but it immediately put itself with the best journalism movies of all time, All the President's Men and Spotlight. Other critics were of a similar mind, as September 5 is 'Certified Fresh' at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet audiences and awards bodies mostly ignored it. While I never would have expected September 5 to be a $100 million movie, a shifting release date that ultimately had it open limited on December 13, 2024, before releasing everywhere in the US on January 17, 2025, yielded disappointing results (just $2.5 million in the US). Major awards bodies didn't recognize it either, with the Golden Globes only giving it one nomination (even though it was for Best Picture) and the Oscars following suit (nominating it for Best Original Screenplay). The German Film Awards gave the movie its proper due, handing it nine of the 10 awards it was nominated for, including Outstanding Feature Film. At just over 90 minutes and an almost non-stop, tense thriller, September 5 can hopefully find its audience at last on Prime Video. Moving on to The Fire Inside, directed by Rachel Morrison, this is another based-on-a-true-story movie, this time about Claressa Shields, a young boxer from Flint, Mich., who became the first American woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics for boxing. Her incredible athletic accomplishment is just one part of the movie though, as it also touches on the reality that Olympic glory does not always bring the benefits you might expect. That extra bit of depth to the story (courtesy of a script from Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins), along with the chemistry between stars Ryan Destiny and Bryan Tyree Henry, are the secret sauce to this movie, which I gave four stars in my The Fire Inside review. Unfortunately again, The Fire Inside failed to register at the box office (just over $8 million) and felt like it was quickly forgotten. We need to remedy that for both The Fire Inside and September 5. I highly recommend you give these movies a chance now that they are available to stream on Prime Video.
Fox News
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Ex-ESPN star shares stance on transgender athletes in girls' and women's sports
Former ESPN star Jeannine Edwards made her stance on transgender athletes competing in girls' and women's sports clear in an interview on Tuesday. Edwards appeared on OutKick's "Don't @ Me with Dan Dakich" and said she couldn't believe there was a debate about the issue in sports. "I cannot believe that we have even gotten to this point," Edwards said. "I mean 50 years of Title IX and all those decades of working up to that and getting to that point where women could have equal access, equal opportunity, equal benefits, but they need to be in their own niche. Because let's face it, men have 60% more muscle mass, they've got a heck of a lot more bone density and bone mass, larger lung capacity, larger oxygen consumption capacity. It doesn't matter whether you are taking hormones or not. "It doesn't matter whether you say you identify as a female, I'm sorry your physiology of your body as a man is much different than that of the body of a woman. So, to me, this a no-brainer and I don't understand why some people on the left think that is a cause that is going to be a winner for them just as I don't believe that this immigration issue and deporting these criminal aliens, I don't think that's a winning issue for them either." The New Jersey native was an ESPN and ABC Sports broadcaster from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. A New York Times/Ipsos Survey released in January showed that the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, don't think transgender athletes should be permitted to compete in women's sports. Of the 2,128 people polled, 79% said biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in women's sports. Of the 1,025 people who identified as Democrats or leaning Democratic, 67% said transgender athletes should not be allowed to compete with women. Among 1,022 Republicans, that number was 94%. Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
When Terrorism First Went Live: The Munich Olympics That Changed Broadcasting Forever
The boom of social media over the past two decades has democratized journalism to the point wherein a profession once lofted and lauded and dominated by individuals fearlessly committed to the dogged pursuit of truth has devolved into a faux subspecialty of online influencers who go from hocking lip gloss to declaring themselves experts on hot button subjects ranging from Middle East geopolitics to epidemiology. All within the span of a millisecond. Today, everything has become fair game for public consumption. But in 1972, Roone Arledge, then-president of ABC Sports, was left to contend with a conundrum never before experienced: should real-time footage of the 1972 Munich massacre, in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team, be made available to viewers global-wide?September 5, writer-director Tim Fehlbaum's Oscar-nominated historical drama, functions as a chronicle of this tragedy as seen through the perspective of the ABC Sports network broadcasting team, with Peter Sarsgaard as Arledge, John Magaro as Emmy Award-winning production executive Geoffrey Mason and Ben Chaplin as legendary sportscaster Marvin Bader. But the film is also a throwback to a bygone era in journalism in which career reporters contended with newsroom ethics while covering the latest breaking news.'It was the first time the Olympics were broadcast live globally,' says John Ira Palmer, who produced September 5 alongside partners Sean Penn and John Wildermuth, with whom Palmer formed Projected Picture Works in 2021. 'We had almost a billion people over the course of the Olympics watching these things unfold. What happened that day in Munich from that ABC Sports team forever changed the way that news is told.' Palmer, a film instructor at USC School of Cinematic Arts and AFI Conservatory and whose previous credits include Penn's 2021 film Flag Day and Asphalt City, has always been interested in society's consumption of media.'We're now in this new moment, with AI and social media — and I think our ethics haven't really caught up with our technology,' says Palmer. 'The larger existential quandaries remain when you walk out of the newsroom: we're doing our job, we're telling the truth and reporting on things that happened to the broad population as quickly and as accurately as possible. But is that the right thing to do? It's something journalists still have to grapple with every day.' Fehlbaum, the Switzerland-born director and co-writer of the horror-cum-sci-fi flicks Hell and The Colony, structured September 5 around the perspective of the ABC Sports news crew following a 'research conversation' with Mason.'As a 28-year-old at the time, [Mason] experienced firsthand in the TV control room how the team transitioned from sports reporting to crisis coverage,' says Fehlbaum. 'His vivid recollections of that intense 22-hour marathon of live reporting were so compelling that we decided to tell the story entirely from his perspective. The subject of media influence on global political events felt especially pertinent, particularly in today's context.'Sparse in violent imagery, September 5 — filmed over a 32-day period in Munich for less than $10 million — is a testament to how powerful cinema can be when it's about what's not on screen even more so than what is. The Paramount Pictures movie hits theaters widely Jan. 17.'Watching a film away from any social media discourse, I hope we can have good conversations,' says Palmer, 'and, hopefully, become better as a society — together.'
The Independent
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Oscar-nominated Munich Olympics drama September 5 is the wrong film for the moment
When it comes to art, the word 'apolitical' serves largely as a kind of grand delusion. You can't simply shake the meaning and implication out of words and images like they're a dusty, old carpet; and neither can people simply switch off morality and emotion, conscious or subconscious, like a button on a machine. Such concepts have a hollowing effect on September 5 (pronounced 'September Five'), Tim Fehlbaum's film about the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, during which eight gunmen from the Palestinian militia Black September killed two members of the Israeli team, taking a further nine members hostage. In a failed rescue attempt, all nine athletes were killed, alongside five of the eight Black September members and a West German police officer. It's a moment that's been channelled into worthwhile cinema before: its aftermath was famously covered by Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005), whose script, penned by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner, showed far more interest in engaging with the moral and emotional underpinnings of Israeli and Palestinian violence. September 5 takes a comparatively oblique approach, focusing on ABC Sports's live TV coverage of the event. It indulges the notion that all that really matters is the telling of stories, at any risk or any cost – and, in doing so, takes a stance of wilful ignorance when it comes to both historical context and journalistic ethics. Its final beat, and declaration of concrete achievement, occurs when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) informs us that more people watched their coverage than the moment Neil Armstrong stepped out on the moon. Instead of politics, we're served borderline fetishistic images of chain-smoking men in shirts and ties – plus a woman, fictional German translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch) – deeply engaged in the work of problem solving. It's almost entirely set within the studio, dimly and evocatively lit by cinematographer Markus Förderer to look like a mad scientist's laboratory of ideas. Every inch of the screen is packed with rotary dial phones, bulky cameras, thick cables, sweaty brows, and rolled-up sleeves. It's about journalism as hard, rugged work, captured in bracing close-ups. Actors deliver each line with a certain practised bravado, brows furrowed and hands on hips. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay seems based largely on its ability to deliver neat, little quips ('These cops have no idea what they're doing'; 'No wonder they lost the war'). From the very moment the ABC crew first hear gunshots, Fehlbaum's film becomes a single, steady drip feed of adrenaline. Could one of those heavy-duty television cameras be wheeled outside and up into the view of the Israeli team's hotel room? Could one of the news crew (Daniel Adeosun) be dressed up as a US athlete, with a forged ID and film canisters taped to his body, in order to sneak past the cordon? If the German media announce a development, do they really need a second confirmation? At the forefront of these decisions is Geoffrey Mason, head of the Munich control room. He's played by First Cow 's John Magaro, an actor with a fierce, natural intelligence to him, who can express to the audience directly that his actions have a weight to them, and will breed their own consequences. Yet, Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David's script treats all context, about the history of Israel and Palestine or the political tension already hanging over the 1972 Games, as background noise. There's a line here or there about how West Germany's lack of security at the event was shaped by its desire to create distance between the present and the country's Nazi past. There's a moment when a French-Algerian member of the team (Zinedine Soualem) takes a stand against an anti-Arab comment. The team's only expert in the Middle East, Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), is ushered off screen with a single warning: 'We have to be very sensitive about what we say.' In any context, it betrays a lack of curiosity. But watched now, at the very same time as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians return to their homes in Gaza, often to find them reduced to rubble, while so much of the media world turns away from them – well, it's jarring. The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn't just wrong: it's laughable.
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
One of the best thriller movies of 2024 is now available to stream — and it's rated 93% on Rotten Tomatoes
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. I almost missed my screening of 'September 5' last month. A combination of factors caused me to cut it extremely close to getting to the movie theater on time, but in the end, I was seriously thankful I managed to make it to my seat as the pre-movie ads were finishing. That's because 'September 5' is undoubtedly a must-watch movie. 'September 5' is a historical thriller directed by Tim Fehlbaum that recounts the tragic Munich massacre that occurred at the 1972 Olympics in Germany and has recently been nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the upcoming Oscars 2025. While it's still technically in theaters for now, it's also been made available to stream at home on POVD platforms, including Amazon and Apple, as of this week. If you stumble upon this movie while browsing your preferred streaming service this week, you might be wondering if it's worth the rental fee (or even purchasing outright), let me make a case for why 'September 5' is a seriously gripping thriller that deserves your attention. And for more recommendations, check out the 5 Netflix shows we'll be binge watching in 2025. September 5, 1972, a dedicated US broadcasting crew working for ABC Sports are stationed in Munich, covering the ongoing Olympic games. However, when gunshots ring out, everything rapidly changes. The sports broadcasters suddenly find themselves at the very heart of an active hostage situation as it quickly comes to light that a terrorist group has broken into the apartments housing the Israeli athletes and is holding them at gunpoint. With the eyes of the entire nation on them and ABC's traditional news team fighting to take control of the coverage, the crew must pull together as they experience the intense emotions and challenges of reporting on what would eventually become a harrowing global tragedy. Based on the setup, 'September 5' might sound like your garden-variety thriller. It covers a well-known historical event, one primed for an intense (but sensitively told) recount on the silver screening. However, this movie makes one bold call: The entire movie is set within the newsroom. We are never shown the outside world. All our glimpses at the events on the ground come via television screens within the dimly lit and cramped rooms that function as the operation center for the ABC Sports broadcasters. Rather than limiting the movie or making viewers feel detached from the proceedings, this bold decision has an incredibly powerful effect as viewers feel just like the journalists in the room, trying to piece together the ongoing events and cut through the noise. This unique approach to telling this story significantly adds to the overall tension and accurately conveys the sense of controlled chaos found in a media newsroom when a major story is breaking. It's a masterstroke of a decision to frame the movie this way, and it makes 'September 5' one of the most gripping thrillers I've seen in at least the last half a decade. It's a masterstroke of a decision to frame the movie this way, and it makes 'September 5' one of the most gripping thrillers I've seen in at least the last half a decade. The cast is also worthy of a shoutout. While Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro have enjoyed (deserved) plaudits for their leading roles, my favorite performance comes from Leonie Benesch as Marianne, a German translator. Her interactions with the American staff are fascinating and crackle with geopolitical tension. Plus, her horror at the terrible events occurring coupled with her generational trauma post World War II, add character depth. Of course, anybody who knows how events played out on September 5, 1972, will know the devastating ending the movie is building toward. I can't pretend that this movie version concludes on a cheerful note, but there is still a sense of appreciation for the news crew that ensured the coverage could be beamed around the world. But most of all, 'September 5' stands as a testament and tribute to the day's innocent victims. I'm far from alone in my praise for 'September 5.' The movie premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last August and it's been receiving rave reviews ever since. The movie currently holds a seriously impressive 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Randy Myers of the San Jose Mercury called the movie 'a gripping historical account from start to finish,' while Kyle Smith of the Wall Street Journal labeled it 'tough, rough, messy and gritty.' Elizabeth Weitzman of Time Out awarded the movie four stars, and said, 'More often than not, September 5 feels like a great 1970s thriller that could only have been made in the 21st century.' IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio was also impressed with the movie: ''September 5' works most powerfully as a behind-closed-doors, single-room thriller, even as what we see on a wall of monitors is almost too unreal to believe.' It isn't just critics praising the movie either. 'September 5' holds a strong 91% audience score (via Rotten Tomatoes). Recent user reviews praise the flick for its 'Great tension throughout' and 'period correct' 1970s setting. Another declares it's 'one of the best movies I've seen in a while.' 'September 5' is engaging and exciting but also thoughtful and remarkably well constructed. It's a historical thriller that manages to walk the tightrope between being respectful of the history it chronicles while being extremely gripping from the very beginning to the bitter end. If you're looking for dramatic thrillers offering more than cheap shock value, 'September 5' is the ideal candidate. The movie's creative single-location setup is wonderful, the cast is all excellent, and its exploration of the challenges of live media coverage is fascinating and remains relevant even in the 21st century. It's a historical thriller with a lot going for it. However, 'September 5' isn't the only new movie available to watch at home this week. Check out my roundup of all the top new movies across the biggest streaming service for plenty of alternative picks, including some with a slightly less heavy subject matter. 5 top new movies to stream this week Netflix drops first look at new crime thriller Prime Video this intense survival movie
