"butcher's hands; gentle souls"

Munich is the first Steven Spielberg picture in almost twenty years that, to my mind, is virtually unblemished. Thanks in large part to Tony Kushner, he finally has a script whose literary intelligence is equal to his considerable visual intelligence, and for that reason, the subtlety of this film may be lost on much of his usual audience. In Eric Bana—excellent once again—he has a lead who is able to register convincingly the soul-damage wreaked by vengeance.

It's a flawless thriller, technically—no director moves objects and people around in three dimensions like Spielberg does—but it also has much to offer in moral insight. Spielberg does not propose to tell us what can be done to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but what he does articulate most firmly (and perhaps a little obviously by times—this is my one small reservation) is that we go down the path of violence in an attempt to take back control, but inevitably, it is violence that takes us.