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...

And Their Children After Them review – racism and revenge festers in smalltown France

Venice film festival
Nineties-set drama adapted from the bestselling novel zeroes in on tensions in a post-industrial community, sparked by a feud over a motorbike

Class and racial tensions come to the boil in this potent tale of disaffected youth in smalltown France. Co-directed by Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma from Nicolas Mathieu’s bestselling novel, this is a state-of-the-nation drama dressed up as a coming-of-age tale (or possibly vice-versa); it is at once intimate and expansive in the way in which it connects the low-rise estates to the posh homes on the hill. It also brings a dose of dirty social-realism to this year’s Venice film festival.

The time-frame is the 90s, although its socio-economic tensions still apply, just as the (fictional) burg of Heillange is broadly representative of a thousand other towns in France and elsewhere; living in the shadow of its shuttered steelworks and inhabited by too many people with too little to do. Heillange, we are told, is “a town of hard times”, where the big local news is the opening of an indoor ski slope. The white ex-steelworkers live in humdrum terraced houses and the immigrant ex-steelworkers live in the humdrum block of flats down the road. Neither camp evidently has much to do with the other until a minor crisis triggers a chain reaction.

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