Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Post, is a revelation. The new film represents an embrace of liberalism deliberately designed to intervene against the vast rightward shift of American politics since the neo-conservative revolution of the late 1970s, for which the rise of Donald Trump is the apotheosis (or at least one hopes). That embrace of…
While watching Spotlight, one of this year’s Academy Award Best Picture nominees, I cerebrated that the greatest journalist in the history of cinema is neither Charles Foster Kane nor Bob Woodward, but lawyer turned documentarian Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman set out to replicate in the late 20th century United States what Emile Zola had done to…
Journalists will surely prefer the plucky success story told by Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015), about the Boston Globe’s exposure of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of priests molesting children, to the muddy failures in Truth (2015). James Vanderbilt’s film adaptation of Mary Mapes’ memoir about the firing of Dan Rather, Truth centers on CBS News airing…