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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Streaming: Thelma and the best films about old-age rebellion

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June Squibb’s star turn as a ninetysomething gran, scammed and out for justice, joins a club of indomitable seniors in the movies, from Anne Reid to Jack Nicholson

June Squibb’s career has run on a different timeline to that of most movie stars: she made her film debut, in Woody Allen’s Alice, at the age of 60, and it was another 23 years before she landed her breakthrough role in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. Her performance as an embittered pensioner who saltily badmouths past acquaintances and flashes the gravestone of an ex got her an Oscar nomination. It also got her a run of progressively less amusing naughty-granny roles. In Hollywood, older people can be blandly comforting support or quirky joke fodder but not much more.

In Thelma, however, the now 95-year-old Squibb gets her first leading role, as a phone-scam victim tracking down those who robbed her, and adds some welcome human shading to the pensioner-behaving-badly stereotype. Its heroine may ride a scooter on her quest for justice, but Josh Margolin’s film avoids cheap jokes of the old-people-say-the-darnedest things variety, and amid its generally cheery tone makes some sharp points about how society patronises and shortchanges its senior citizens.

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