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...

Streaming: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and the best post-apocalyptic films

George Miller’s latest dystopian instalment follows a well-trodden end-of-the-world path, from the stark ruins of The Road to Pixar’s smartest film, WALL-E

You have to hand it to George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, now five films in: it has kept the end of the world going for the better part of half a century. A big, busy, ornately designed prequel to 2015’s delirious series peak Mad Max: Fury Road, the new-to-streaming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) isn’t exactly meant to be cosy or comforting. It takes place in the same scorched, uninhabitable desert wasteland as its predecessors, a landscape that essentially defined the idea of a post-apocalyptic Earth in the popular imagination.

And yet it’s so familiar now as to feel almost nostalgic. Most of Furiosa’s pleasures relate to the past rather than the future. Miller has assembled another driving, visually lavish, slam-bang adventure of rising to power in a hopeless place, but its iconography abounds in callbacks to previous entries, while you can’t watch Anya Taylor-Joy’s impressively steely turn in the title role without thinking of Charlize Theron’s more hardened interpretation. The shock of the new, and the terror of the future unknown, is missing.

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