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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Gena Rowlands: the fiercest, most incandescent star of US indie cinema

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Subtle yet tough and fearless, the actor blazed a trail through American movies in the 70s – in particular in close collaboration with her husband John Cassavetes

• Gena Rowlands, star of A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria, dies at 94

‘I was always a BROAD! I can’t stand the sight of MILK!” This is Gena Rowlands at her awe-inspiring toughest in John Cassavetes’ extraordinary drama-thriller Gloria from 1980. She is sexy, smart, a match for any man. Rowlands was a strong, passionate heroine in the tradition of Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall. In fact, her director-husband John Cassavetes was in some ways Bogart to her Bacall. Rowlands staked a claim to the male prerogative of being sensual, dangerous and damaged; a natural survivor. In Gloria, and also in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), in which she plays a severe philosophy professor, Rowlands wears a belted trenchcoat, the kind that Bogart would wear.

In recent years, Rowlands was known most widely as the sweet old lady in the tearjerking drama The Notebook (2004), being read to in a retirement home by the ageing and gallant James Garner. She was tenderly directed in this film by her son, Nick Cassavetes. For all its mawkishness, the film acquired a real fanbase, but it gives only the most oblique indication of what Rowlands was like in her magnificent, leonine prime.

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