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...

Mark Kermode on… Martin Scorsese’s love of British cinema

The director’s new BFI season championing hidden gems of British film, hot on the heels of his Powell and Pressburger documentary, reveals some of the inspirations of a film-making great and passionate fan

This weekend, the BFI Southbank in London begins a season of films entitled Martin Scorsese Selects Hidden Gems of British Cinema. Among the treats that caught my eye are a terrific Terence Fisher double bill (1948’s To the Public Danger and 1952’s Stolen Face), Roy Ward Baker’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (1973) and a rare nitrate-print screening of Alberto Cavalcanti’s dark 1942 gem, Went the Day Well?

The fact that a director whose own extraordinary CV includes Taxi Driver (1973), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and, just last year, Killers of the Flower Moon should curate such a season may seem remarkable. But Scorsese has always been a film fan as much as a film-maker, and the movies he has championed over the years are every bit as important to him as those he has made.

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