Grabbing you by the gut from its opening moments, Munich is Steven Spielberg's very best film to datebetter, yes, than Schindler's List or, in an entirely different vein, Close Encounters .

Key characters are created out of whole cloth, but the essential facts of the film follow the historical record. Munich concerns a team of Israelis (led by Eric Bana of The Hulk and Troy ) as they embark on the morally compromised mission of exacting murderous revenge for the terrorist raid on their nation's athletic team at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The hit men include Daniel Craig ( Layer Cake , and very soon, the new James Bond) and Ciaran Hinds (Julius Caesar in HBO's Rome ), with Geoffrey Rush back in Jerusalem as their secret Mossad boss, sheltered behind six degrees of deniability.

The script, co-authored by Tony Kushner ( Angels in America ), is taut and topnotch; the performances are impeccable. The film sustains a mounting sense of having entered a gray area where dire deeds produce dubious results. As the villains responsible for the initial attack are picked off one by one, crueler criminals replace them. As the Israelis work their way across Western Europe in pursuit of their quarry, retaliation takes place on El Al flights and in terrorist acts back home.

Spielberg does commit one egregious misstep when he shows us the protagonist having long- overdue sex with his comely wife (Ayelet Zorer), cutting back and forth between this and the long-withheld flashbacks of the deaths of the Munich athletes. It's jarring, and it's strangely clumsy, but the rest of Munich is ever so finely wrought that the filmmaker's faulty judgment in this one matter must be forgiven.

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