Cover-Up review – atrocity exposer Seymour Hersh, journalist legend, gets a moment in the spotlight

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Hersh’s record on uncovering the big stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, speaks for itself. This documentary watches him at work: dogged, nonconformist and combative Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh has a longer record of breaking big stories, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to torture by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – the latter a historic scoop underscored by the stomach-turning photos which Hersh brought to light. Hersh is asked if Abu Ghraib would have been the story it was without those pictures and replies: “No pictures, no story.” Well, maybe. But his other scoops had no pictures of this kind. One incidental thing Abu Ghraib showed was how ubiquitous digital photography became at the beginning of the century; how easy it was to take...
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The Tower review – apocalyptic lockdown horror goes into the dark, deadly void

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This tale of a tower block enveloped in nothingness, and the terrible things its residents do to survive, starts grim and just gets grimmer … and grimmer

At the beginning of this remorselessly bleak apocalyptic nightmare, the residents of a tower block in Paris wake up to find the world outside has disappeared. “There is no outdoors,” marvels one man. In its place is a vast black nothingness that swallows up everything and anyone that enters it. About five minutes in, you might start thinking about the plot holes, which feel as gaping as the void’s blackness. Such as, how is that the flats still have electricity? What is making the TVs flicker like it’s the 1980s? Why hasn’t the building been sucked into the abyss?

Actually, these questions are a pleasant distraction from the film’s grim vision of how low humanity can sink. Its writer and director, the novelist and film-maker Guillaume Nicloux, clearly subscribes to a Hobbesian view that, in the event of society breaking down, we’ll all be boiling each other’s fleshy parts in 15 minutes flat. The residents in the block, quickly realising that nobody is coming to save them, begin to organise themselves into alliances to ration food and water – “It’s going to get ugly fast,” mutters someone darkly. Five months down the line, they are pallid, haggard and greasy-haired. It took me a couple of seconds for the penny to drop when I saw dogs and cats in cages on the counters in kitchens. Life in the block is lawless, run by competing gangs trading in pet meat.

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