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...

Last Things review – stones yield up their memories in poetic vision of life on Earth

Deborah Stratman’s film looks far beyond humanity for answers to the big questions of survival, gathering the words of scientists and imaginative writers

Moving from the microscopic to the intergalactic, artist and film-maker Deborah Stratman offers a strikingly expansive vision of life on Earth, one that deliberately decentres human existence. With its collagist approach, this medium-length work turns to rocks for answers to the big question of survival and extinction. Having been around, in some cases, for billions of years, what do these mineral formations remember?

As explained by geologist Marcia Bjornerud, whose interviews and lectures form part of the voiceover, rocks do indeed hold memories. A bedrock, for instance, can carry traces of glaciers that no longer exist. These physical manifestations of past and present timelines encourage a different, non-linear way of looking at time and the world at large. This synergistic perspective is also reflected in Stratman’s dynamic, associative editing. Bjornerud’s empirical observations are punctuated by the enigmatic voice of film-maker Valérie Massadian, who reads out poetic passages from works by Clarice Lispector, J-H Rosny and others.

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