YOUR MOVIE REVIEW
JAMES Burgess is a 27-year-old performance, drama and theatre graduate. The former Fallibroome High School pupil has attended the BAFTA Film Awards in London every year since 2009. James lives in Macclesfield. Visit his website at jabfilm reviews.blogspot.com. rate in the ongoing Vietnam War.
It’s set in 1971, at the height of the highly controversial Nixon administration – and demonstrates just how systemic the levels of corruption and collusion were.
Its themes of media plurality, questionable authenticity and gender inequality are made doubly fascinating and ever more presciently topical – in a way they were never expected to – with our current political climate of desensitisation in the era of so-called ‘fake news’, abuses of power and the pay-gap.
It stars Meryl Streep as the head of The Washington Post, Kay Graham. Strong, vulnerable and with an indeterminable inner- steel, she is forced to make the toughest of choices in a profession dominated by men.
It’s another absolutely fantastic (and 21st Oscar-nominated) performance by Streep: her expert timing, delivery and brilliant use of pauses ensure that her face is a continual tapestry of emotion.
Tom Hanks also brings a certain robustness to Ben Bradlee, the newspaperman who, in one pivotal exchange, reiterates to Graham just how critical the situation is: ‘What’re you going to do – Mrs Graham?’
With fantastic pacing, urgency and an eye for every conceivable detail, Spielberg succeeds in making another of his powerfully polemic, more politic films, which instead of feeling heavily weighed down by talky exposition, is executed in thoroughly entertaining and totally gripping style – just as he did with the equally glorious Lincoln, which chronicled another momentous milestone in human history.
Cinematographer Janusz Kamanski and editor Michael Kahn ratchet up the tension in one central sequence in particular, where all parties are on ends of telephones having to make the pivotal decision of whether or not to publish the papers.
The camera does a birds-eye, 360-degree chandelier swoop around the room.
John Williams’s score also encapsulates the icy chill of paranoia and covert secrecy.