Post, The

Stars: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Tracy Letts, Bruce Greenwood, Matthew Rhys, Alison Brie, Carrie Coon, Jesse Plemons, Curzon Pobell

Director: Steven Spielberg

Hanks and Streep give terrific performances - his best for some time - in this newspaper drama which, although it takes rather too long to get to the pith of things, finally hits all the right emotional buttons.

She's Katharine 'Kay' Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, then (1971) a smallish player in the East Coast press world, and Hanks is Ben Bradlee, its trenchant editor.

When the Post comes into possession of highly confidential White House papers revealing that four US presidents - Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson - colluded into deceiving the American people over Vietnam, a conflict that all four knew was a war that America could not win, battlelines are swiftly set between the newspaper and the authorities over the right to publish.

In some ways a prequel to All the President's Men (which featured the Watergate expose by the same paper), this is not quite in that class but, after a stodgy first half-hour, will have you gripped right up to the end.

David Quinlan

USA 2017. UK Distributor: EntertainmentOne (DreamWorks/20th Century Fox). Technicolor.
112 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 12.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 0, Swearing 1.

Review date: 24 May 2018

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