Munich - ****

Don't be thrown off by the title of Steven Spielberg's new movie. Munich takes its name from an awful event - the kidnapping and massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics, but it isn't really about it. And though it focuses its action on the quest by a team of covert Mossad agents to exact retribution on the Palestinians behind the Olympic massacre, the movie isn't really about that, either.

What Spielberg's gripping, fascinating film is about is the effect of sanctioned killing, on the individual who carries it out and on the society or culture that condones it, even - perhaps especially - if the killing is believed to serve a higher purpose. The movie has sparked sharp criticism from those who would like it to take clearer sides on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though it would be hard to imagine that any intelligent moviegoer wouldn't realize on which side the director who made Schindler's List would fall in that debate. What makes the complaints more specious is the fact that the movie's hero is clearly Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), the young leader of the Mossad group that scours Europe finding and killing Palestinians it believes helped carry out the Olympic killings.

As his mission drags on, and as the list of those he must kill keeps growing while bodies of Israelis and Palestinians pile up around the world, Avner, who has left a young wife and newborn child at home to undertake the secret killings, grapples with the usefulness of his assignment. In terms of pace, the movie traces the same arc of disillusionment. At the beginning of the film, Spielberg stages the reprisal bombings as if he were directing one of his popcorn summer blockbusters - tight, tense scenes that end with rousing explosions. But this is far from a popcorn film, and by the end, the bombings carried out by the team are rote affairs, drudgingly enacted by agents who have by now seen too much to believe that another explosion will bring the conflict any closer to its conclusion. By the end, another explosion just means another dead body, and - as to paraphrase one of the Mossad agents in the film - another black mark on their souls.

As pointed out during its opening credits, the movie is "inspired by real events," and should not be taken as an historically accurate recreation of the events at Munich and the aftermath. What is should be taken as is an amazing, ambitious film that lays impossibly difficult questions about the appropriate response to terrorist acts at the feet of the audience, then leaves each of us to make up our own minds. And if a single glance at the front page of the newspaper doesn't tell you how relevant the questions it tackles are, the movie's heartbreaking, haunting final image leaves no doubt.

This is one of the best movies of the year.