Popular reviews

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½ 3

  One thread that stood out on this watch: A quiet but brutal critique of television to rival the far louder satire of Network, which was released the same year. The film repeatedly shows televisions, mostly around the Washington Post newsroom, presenting a counterfactual narrative of the Nixon administration that stands in complete opposition to the one assembled by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. While they search for the facts, the Post TVs mostly regurgitate the Nixon party line and publicize their “non-denial denials” of the latest Post story, propagating an illusion of a moral, lawful President unfairly attacked by a politically motivated newspaper and its agenda-driven journalists. TV obscures the truth while newspapers expose it, an idea neatly encapsulated in the final scene where Nixon is inaugurated on television in the foreground, while Woodward and Bernstein pound away on their typewriters in the background.

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  Review by mulaney ★★★★ 19

  [whispers]: i’ve seen this movie twice and still don’t really understand the watergate scandal and at this point i’m too afraid to ask

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  Review by Alyssa Heflin ★★★★★ 2

  Fuck it, let’s stand by the boys.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★ 5

  79/100

  Amazing what you can get away with when the subject is so recent and momentous that a general audience can be trusted to respond to minutiae. Zodiac actually seems concise by comparison (it also has a killer to cut away to for a while, whereas this is 100% investigation after the break-in), and Pakula continually makes choices that would be considered daft in almost any other Hollywood context: introducing his protagonists with zero fanfare, as if they were bit players; training the camera on notes and doodles in order to foreground a slow accumulation of bewildering detail; letting actors shout at each other over the sound of an airplane passing overhead, when neither the plane nor the shouting has…

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  Review by Robin ★★★★

  when the editor calls them Woodstein 👌

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  Review by cassandra ★★★★ 2

  There's a character named Deep Throat.

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  Review by lauren ★★★★★ 1

  when aliens come to earth and ask us to take them to our leader we’re gonna show them a picture of robert redford

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  Review by grace spelman ★★★★½ 1

  completely changed my opinion on parking garages

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 3

  97

  Gauntlets of words as typewriters lay their mark along the paper. Television screens always in sight, even if our principal characters aren't watching, the static and analog providing a weak signal for the Nixon presidential nomination. "Four more years! Four more years!", all while Woodward is scrunched over under the glow of the fluorescent. When the dialogue isn't crackling, hot over the tongue and pierced with "what if" rhetoric and the lingering silence of an unspoken acknowledgement, director Alan J. Pakula is marking the spaces, in which information is disclosed, uncovered, and hidden in plain sight, with sharp definitions of perspective and split-diopters, and offering legendary DP Gordon Lewis the slowly consuming immediacy and danger of darkness. Truly a masterpiece. The only real issue with this movie is that it isn't six hours long.

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  Review by DirkH ★★★★½ 8

  This is perhaps one of the best procedural films ever made and what I respect about it is that it approaches its subject matter without frills and added fictional distractors to spice up the story. It sticks to the task at hand and, much like the journalists featuring in the story, it is intent on presenting the account as close to the truth as possible.

  Alan J. Pakula seems to understand one thing very well here and that is that if you want to tell a story as intricate as this one, you have to make sure that the audience will listen to those telling it. He does that brilliantly by allowing for a lot of dialogue, not forcing himself…

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  Review by Adam Kempenaar ★★★★★ 5

  They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

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  Review by David Chen ★★★★ 2

  "The truth is these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand."