‘The Post’
After the Trump election, Steven Spielberg moved quickly to put together a film about the Washington Post and its decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in defiance of the Nixon White House. With an all-star cast at his disposal, including Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, Carrie Coon, and Sarah Paulson, the film is an unabashed celebration of the value of journalistic doggedness at a time when the old chummy institutions of Washington had been used to keep the American public ignorant of the truths about Vietnam. It’s a movie that celebrates journalists at a time when the media is widely disliked, but that’s somewhat always been the case. It’s, in many ways, a movie that injects the hopefulness that truth has been a deterrent to power before and it might well be again.