journalism
theartsdesk
The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 Awards are so-called because they consist of 10 awards in 10 categories, each of which has 10 nominees. Nine of the awards are confined to a specifc area of the creative industries (stage, theatre, music etc). The exception is the Rising Stars category, open to anyone under the age of 25. Last year's winner was Nina-Sophia Miralles, founding editor of the online magazine Londnr.Londnr.com is a destination of choice for readers in search of lively, unexpected cultural insights that are hard to find in any other single location. From food to architecture via Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may be having a moment of déjà vu, as Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s new play (which lands in the West End after a UK tour) was previously a BBC film (shown in 2013), and a very fine one too, covering as it does a true story from the First World War. Now, with added music by Nick Green, they have turned The Wipers Times into an intimate stage piece.In the mud and mayhem of Flanders, in a bombed-out building in the Belgian town of Ypres (mis-pronounced Wipers by British Tommies), two officers – Captain Fred Roberts (James Dutton) and Lieutenant Jack Pearson (George Kemp) – discover an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If Christine may occasionally be an uncomfortable film to watch, it’s impossible not to be gripped by Rebecca Hall’s sheer, virtuoso turn in the title role of Antonio Campos’ third feature: it sears itself on the memory with a pitiless rigour that won’t be easily forgetten.Hall plays Christine Chubbuck, the Florida television presenter who shot herself in 1974 while live on air on the station for which she worked. If that’s a real-life act that’s (inevitably) impossible to follow, Craig Shilowich’s script and Campos’ direction open her story out to us with a fully convincing wider perspective Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Journalism is not what it was and nor quite is the journalism movie. Spotlight is released as a home entertainment with a sticker on the packaging announcing its Oscars for best picture and best original screenplay. It is certainly a gripping story of old-school hacks speaking truth to power. In this case the honours go to the Boston Globe, which took on the might of the Catholic Church to expose the cover-up in which the names of 90 priests linked to cases of historic sexual abuse were locked in a bottom drawer and out of the public domain.The film tells of the efforts by the newspaper’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Communities function in different ways depending on their constituencies, to note just one of the many salient points made by the deeply compelling and equally disturbing Spotlight. The Catholic church in Boston for years closed ranks and shut its eyes so as to enable the systemic culture of child abuse that a cadre of Boston Globe journalists in time uncovered, winning a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for their work: one societal sector pitted against the other only for the scribes' sleuthing to emerge triumphant alongside a legacy of damage that time will never fully put right. The Globe's Read more ...
theartsdesk
The most celebrated reportage to come out the Vietnam War was Michael Herr’s Dispatches, rightly acclaimed as the most visceral journey into the dark heart of America’s first military defeat. But unlike all wars before it, Vietnam was a genuinely visual conflict, brought into the homes of the public via television and photojournalism. And among its most accomplished witnesses were two British photographers. The one everyone has heard of is Don McCullin, but his work was matched picture for picture by the Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths.Jones Griffiths, who died in 2008, was Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Fury Over Sharia Law For Toddlers!” No, not a prime example of spoof headline generator Daily Mail-o-matic, but the latest piece of fantastical scaremongering from the Clarion, a 125-year-old (semi-)fictional rag that’s upped sales by splashing on immigration every day for a year. Editor Morris (Greg Hicks) argues his “issues-led” paper upholds the proud tradition of “combative” British journalism, but his tactic of selling sensationalist speculation as news backfires when one reader interprets it as a literal call to arms – and liberal nemesis the Sentinel may have the scoop.Debut Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The title of Sebastian Junger’s documentary comes from a casual remark made as a group of journalists set off towards conflict in the outskirts of the Libyan town of Misrata: it may sound like a standard question from a battle-hardened war correspondent, but the film that follows shows that Tim Hetherington, whose off-camera voice it is, was anything but that. It was April 11 2011, and that journey would prove fatal for the British photographer and filmmaker. Only weeks earlier he had been in the very different setting of Los Angeles: Restrepo, the remarkable film in which Hetherington and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Well, that was a bit of a brain workout for the first episode - I confess for much of the opening instalment (five more to follow) I didn't have a clue what was going on, who anybody was or how all the characters and a multitude of story strands were connected. Actually, I'm not sure I did entirely understand by the end, but by then the Norwegian thriller set in the nebulous area where politics, finance and journalism collide had drawn me in sufficiently to tune in next week.For fans of the Scandi/Nordic noir genre (or indeed those suffering withdrawal symptoms after Line of Duty and Homeland Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy was released in 2004 it became a sleeper hit and has since appeared on several “Funniest Movies of All Time” lists. Fans have had to wait nearly a decade for a sequel to see how the eponymous news anchor’s life has panned out, and what has happened to his KVWN colleagues – co-anchor Veronica Corningstone, weatherman Brick Tamland, sportscaster Champ Kind and field reporter Brian Fantana – since they worked together on San Diego's local television station in the 1970s.Finally Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is upon us, after a huge Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. It’s the inevitable comparison that The Wipers Times writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman were going to face, and though they aim for something different in what is, after all, a true story, there’s no escaping the same absurdity of clipped understatement that they have given their British officer heroes, or the essential one-dimensional nature of characterisation. Even fleshed out with free-standing cabaret-style sketches, at 90 minutes this sometimes felt as long as Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
When The Newsroom’s first season started in 2012 the unthinkable seemed to have happened: Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network, had lost his mojo. Not even his previous, erratic show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, cancelled after its first season, had moments as excruciating as this. Set within a fictional cable news channel and centred on a ratings-hungry anchor man, Will McAvoy, who has rediscovered his fire for campaigning journalism, The Newsroom sought to combine the idealism and calling-to-account of Sorkin’s best work. But whereas Read more ...