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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Shelley Duvall was a sublime and subversive screen presence | Peter Bradshaw

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The unique and often misunderstood actor, who has died at the age of 75, was frequently at her best with Robert Altman and memorably terrorised by Stanley Kubrick

Shelley Duvall, star of The Shining and Annie Hall, dies aged 75

It was Shelley Duvall’s destiny to become most widely known for a single film or maybe for a single poster image from it, shockingly and cartoonishly explicit. The image certainly did justice to her intensity and capacity for utterly unselfconscious performance, but said nothing about the subtlety, strength, wit and unfakable superstar quality that otherwise marked her work.

This was her Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in 1980, playing the terrified wife of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, marooned together in a haunted offseason hotel. To the right of the poster’s frame, Duvall’s wide-open eyes and mouth – black chasms of fear, an almost supernatural and faintly eroticised image. To the left, the grinningly crazy face of Nicholson as he crashes through the door with an axe, intent on killing her. For many, the image came to epitomise the sexual politics of Hollywood that shaped (but did not destroy) Duvall’s career. For all that he’s sweatily deranged, Nicholson looks relaxed and enjoying himself. Duvall looks genuinely afraid, a testament of course to her talent, but it’s uncomfortable to perceive given what we later found out about the toll that The Shining took on her, endless takes and punishing schedules without a word of emollient praise, having to deal with those alpha males Kubrick and Nicholson.

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