A ★★★½ review of Munich

It is, of course, shot beautifully and it moves with incredible pace for such a long, miserable movie. But it always feels kind of uncomfortably caught between the spy thriller and the serious period drama. Full of odd little digressions and a sense, almost, of unreality. It's strange to say that this movie is basically Spielberg's Mulholland Drive, but it kind of is; the movie's plot is so smeared across space and time and there's so much of it that it takes on a sort of dream logic. It's a strange film, 20 years on. It's critical of the Israeli state to a degree that seems almost implausible for a big-budget Hollywood movie made in 2005. But at the same time, it still centers the Israeli perspective on events almost categorically; and it more points at its critique than depicts it. I don't think Spielberg's point with this movie is to try to salvage his Zionism out of a story that is, at its bottom, about the highest echelon of the Israeli state deceiving their own cut-outs to carry…

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