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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Game, set and match: the 20 best sports movies

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As Luca Guadagnino’s acclaimed tennis film Challengers makes its case for sporting immortality, critic Guy Lodge chooses 20 of the genre’s undisputed heavyweights

Analogies of life as sport have been exhausted by every PE teacher in existence. In the movies, however, they’re eternally renewable. Take Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s sleek, sexy, sweat-drenched new film, which hits every metaphor you might expect in its story of three tennis pros locked in a tense love triangle: games are won and lost, points scored, doubles partners swapped, and so on. Shot and paced with the ricocheting energy of a great tennis match, it’s a sports movie that, like many a classic of the genre, understands the parallels between sport and cinema as two great crowd-pleasing pastimes.

The sports movie is pretty much as old as movies themselves: for early silent-cinema pioneers at the turn of the 20th century, the movement and momentum of a baseball game or a boxing match made them as dynamic a subject as any for the camera. Charlie Chaplin’s very first appearance as the Little Tramp, in the short Kid Auto Races at Venice, cast him as a disruptive spectator at a racing-car derby. Classic templates for the genre emerged quickly: the Oscar-winning 1931 hit The Champ nailed a structure for the underdog sporting weepie that shaped everything from Rocky to The Wrestler, while the 1944 Elizabeth Taylor vehicle National Velvet minted a million further feelgood stories of plucky athletes defying the odds. (It’s far harder to involve audiences in stories of an athlete who’s born a winner.)

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