A lot of American film fans may not realize that there are plenty of movies based on a true story that don’t star either Mark Wahlberg or Tom Hanks. It’s true. The universe of non-Wahlberg, non-Hanks dramatizations of real life events is actually quite vast. Let’s zoom in on a small and all-too-rare corner of it containing just a handful of true gems: The real-life journalism movie about reporters who investigated some really fucked up, twisted scandal. Here’s four and a half of them.
⭐️ All The President’s Men, 1976: The grandaddy of them all. Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein. Truth be told, it’s just ever so slightly overrated, but only for plot and pacing issues. The acting and dialogue are excellent as is the direction by Alan Pakula. All that combine to do all the heavy lifting for a plot that is often difficult to parse. You hardly ever notice that you’re lost on things like why Donald Segretti telling Bernstein about his “ratfucking” operation was so important to the overall quest to uncover Nixon’s abuses. The scene is still excellent. To be fair it’s possible, maybe even likely, that All The President’s Men had an audience in 1976 far more familiar with the names and their significance than some of us born more than a decade after Watergate took down the Nixon Adminsitration. Fun trivia: The Washington Post staff shipped crates full of office paper and binders to use as props on the newsroom set built in Los Angeles. Watch it on “Max” (formerly known as HBO Max, name changed for some stupid fucking reason).
⭐️ Shattered Glass, 2003: An outlier on this list because it concerns a scandal internal to the media world in former New Republic reporter Stephen Glass’s career meltdown after being exposed as a fraud who simply made stories up – which seems almost quaint in the day and age of the Gateway Pundit. Hayden Christensen as Glass, Peter Sarsgaard as then-New Republic editor Charles Lane, Steve Zahn as Wired reporter Adam Penenberg, Hank Azaria as the late Mike Kelly. Fun trivia: Star Wars fans may be surprised to see that Hayden Christensen can act. It’s not like the absolute best acting you’ve ever seen, but it’s a competent performance light years better than his turns as Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episodes II and III. Christensen really nails it as a George Santos-esque lying histrionic shitweasel. Watch it on Amazon Prime “FreeVee” (meaning with ads, no Prime required).
⭐️ Spotlight, 2015: This one’s really fucking good. And really fucking harrowing. There’s a reason Spotlight won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Named for the investigative team at the Boston Globe that in 2002 exposed the Catholic Church sex abuse and the systemic coverup scheme in the Archdiocese of Boston. Mark Ruffalo as Spotlight reporter Michael Rezendes, Michael Keaton as Spotlight lead reporter Walter “Robby” Robinson, Rachel McAdams as reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, Liev Schreiber as editor in chief Marty Baron. Fun trivia: This isn’t Michael Keaton’s first turn as a journalist, having previously played a metro editor in Ron Howard’s 1994 comedy-drama The Paper, a fictional story that doesn’t belong on this list. It’s not nearly as good as Spotlight. Watch it on Max.
⭐️ She Said, 2022: The story of two women the New York Times reporters who brought down Harvey Weinstein. Carey Mulligan as Megan Twohey, Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor. Great performances, excellent pacing, really fucking creepy details about the Hollywood titan now spending the rest of his life in prison for the crimes Twohey and Cantor exposed. Fun trivia: To our knowledge this list contains two films with key real life figures cast as themselves (other than in archival footage), the first being Watergate security guard Frank Wills in All The President’s Men and actress Ashley Judd in She Said. Judd’s role is a definitely more personal and you can tell she’s not really acting when she talks about the shit she went through with Weinstein. Watch it on Amazon Prime.
⭐️ Paterno, 2018: This is the “half” when we wrote “four and a half” prior to this list. That doesn’t mean Paterno isn’t a solid film, it’s just that only about half of it is about Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Patriot-News reporter Sara Ganim’s investigation of the Penn State Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal. The rest is about the eponymous Nittany Lions head coach’s downfall as Ganim (who won a Pulitzer in 2012 for her work) dug into the horrific story and coverup. Riley Keough as Ganim, Al Pacino as Joe Paterno, Kathy Baker as Sue Paterno, Larry Mitchell as Jay Paterno. Watch it on Max.
Honorable mention ⭐️ Zodiac, 2007: It depicts a lot about life in a newsroom like the above, but it’s tough to call it strictly a journalism movie. Might be more like a history-based thriller where one of the investigators, Robert Graysmith, is a journalist (actually originally a cartoonist) who works to piece together the mystery of the Zodiac killer’s rampage in late 1960s-early 1970s Bay Area, California. Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith, Mark Ruffalo as San Francisco Police Inspector Dave Toschi, Robert Downey Jr as Paul Avery. Fun trivia: Dave Toschi is said to be the inspiration iconic fictional SFPD cops Frank Bullitt and Harry Callahan, played by Steve McQueen in Bullitt and by Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry series, respectively. Available on Apple, Amazon, etc.
Honorable mention by Jack ⭐️ Where the Buffalo Roam, 1980: A travelogue for an acid trip, is as true a story about the 1972 presidential campaign as gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson could relate, given his recreational use of, well, everything available in the early 70s. Still, the story is about how Rolling Stone reported Nixon’s reelection campaign, and how its new version of journalism shaped a generation. Bill Murray as Hunter S Thompson. Available on Apple, Amazon, etc.