film. It arrives already inflamed by controversy. ... This is Spielberg operating at his peak—an exceptionally made, provocative, and vital film for our times." Chicago Tribune reviewer Allison Benedikt calls Munich a "competent thriller", but laments that as an "intellectual pursuit, it is little more than a pretty prism through which superficial Jewish guilt and generalized Palestinian nationalism" are made to "... look like the product of serious soul-searching." Benedikt states that Spielberg's treatment of the film's "dense and complicated" subject matter can be summed up as "Palestinians want a homeland, Israelis have to protect theirs." She rhetorically asks: "Do we need another handsome, well-assembled, entertaining movie to prove that we all bleed red?" Another critique was Gabriel Schoenfeld's "Spielberg's 'Munich'" in the February 2006 issue of Commentary, who called it "pernicious". He compared the fictional film to history, asserted that Spielberg and especially Kushner felt that the Palestinian terrorists and the Mossad agents are morally equivalent and concluded: "The movie deserves an Oscar in one category only: most hypocritical film of the year." Israeli author and journalist Aaron J. Klein wrote in Slate that the movie was a "distortion" of facts, concluding that "A rigorous factual accounting may not be the point of Munich, which Spielberg has characterized as a 'prayer for peace.' But as result, Munich has less to do with history and the grim aftermath of the Munich Massacre than some might wish." In defense of the climactic sex scene, critics Jim Emerson of the Chicago Sun-Times and Matt Zoller Seitz of Salon compared it to Lady Macbeth's suicide in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, interpreting the sequence as representing the corruption of Avner's personal life as a result of his being conditioned to kill others to avenge Munich. Top ten lists Munich was listed on many critics' top ten lists. 1st – Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly 1st – James Berardinelli, Reelviews 1st – David Edelstein, Slate 2nd – William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer 2nd – Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club 3rd – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times 4th – Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper 4th – Claudia Puig, USA Today 5th – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone 5th – Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly 5th – Richard Schickel, Time 5th – Kimberly Jones, Austin Chronicle 5th – Ty Burr, Boston Globe 5th – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times 7th – Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly 8th – David Ansen, Newsweek 8th – Steve