★★1/2 It’s true, today we’re comparing movies: here we have the twenty-first century version of “All the President’s Men”. Two New York Times journalists (women) investigate the abuse and rape of powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, leading to the rise of the “MeToo” movement. If you’ve seen Alan Pakula’s movie, or “The Informant” (Michael Mann’s masterpiece) or “Spotlight”, or “The Scandal”, you know that it’s all made up. Still, the journalistic thriller works. But it is not enough for the subject matter to be respectable for a film to be immediately “good” in an aesthetic sense, even if it is so in a moral sense. There is some tension to regulation to add “cinema” to the story that does not seem entirely consistent with what actually happened (Spotlight, in that sense, was more candid: people doing their job, basically). An illustration movie, not as Billiken as it could be but almost.
