COVER-UP

COVER-UP, for this writer, is the first necessary movie of 2025. Not merely good, not merely important — necessary. The kind of film that reminds you what documentary cinema is for.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus trace the career of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh from his 1968 reporting on the My Lai massacre — one of the most significant acts of journalism in American history — to his recent reporting on Gaza. What they've made is both a portrait of a man and an argument about democracy: that it requires people willing to look at what institutions would prefer to remain unseen.

American cinema largely abandoned topical risk-taking after the 1980s. The era of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, THE PARALLAX VIEW, and THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR — films that treated government secrecy and institutional corruption as subjects worthy of serious dramatic treatment — ended, and nothing comparable replaced it. COVER-UP is a reminder of what that willingness looked like, and an implicit argument for its return.

The film examines how institutional gatekeepers — editors, publishers, network executives — once engaged with adversarial journalists. The relationship was adversarial in the productive sense: journalism checking power, power pushing back, the tension producing accountability. Hersh represents a generation of journalists who believed that this tension was democracy working correctly.

One reservation: the film is heavy on admiration and light on critical distance. Hersh has made controversial claims throughout his career — claims that serious journalists have disputed, claims that require scrutiny rather than reverence. COVER-UP would have been a more complete portrait, and a more honest argument for journalism's value, had it engaged more rigorously with those disputes. A film about the importance of asking hard questions should be willing to ask hard questions of its own subject.

That caveat noted: see this film. It matters.