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

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...

Abigail review – Dracula’s daughter gets kidnapped in fun-sucking horror

There’s some low-stakes pleasure to be had in the first half of the gory new film from the team behind Ready or Not and Scream but things fall apart disastrously

Last year’s handsome gothic horror The Last Voyage of the Demeter and bombastic Nic Cage comedy Renfield allowed Universal the opportunity to present known IP as something fresh, at least on the surface, stories involving Dracula but told in ways we hadn’t seen before. They represented a nifty marketing strategy for a back catalogue of classic monster movies but both worked better as loglines than finished films – Dracula on a boat, Dracula as a bad boss – and audiences proved as uninterested as critics, the stench of old property distracting from the promise of something new.

As the studio preps a new take on The Wolf Man with next year’s Christopher Abbott-led Wolfman and Robert Eggers’ remake of the Dracula-inspired Nosferatu, here comes Abigail, a poppy reimagining of the little-remembered 1936 horror Dracula’s Daughter. In the contemporary take, she’s a ballerina (Matilda’s Alisha Weir) who gets kidnapped by a group of unaware criminals, hired to keep her locked in a grand old house for 24 hours while ransom money is obtained. But early on, recovering addict and single mother Joey (Melissa Barrera) figures out that something is up and starts to realise that the scared little girl in their care might not be so scared after all.

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