“The Post” takes after great movies like “All the President’s Men”

Katharine Graham is the first female publisher of a major American newspaper — The Washington Post. With help from editor Ben Bradlee, Graham tries to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spans three decades and four U.S. presidents. Together, Bradlee and Graham must overcome their differences as they risk their careers to help bring long-buried truths to light.

Meryl Streep acts as Katharine Graham and her performance was outstanding. She and Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee) were great together.

The gold standard for this sort of true-life journalistic muckraker is, “All the President’s Men,” a movie about the scandal of the decade, and was made in the ’70s. “The Post,” by contrast, seems to be set in some fetishistic museum-piece re-creation of the ’70s, with every drag on a cigarette calling too much attention to itself and too many “casually” signposted references to dinner-party mainstays like “Scotty” Reston and Lawrence Durrell. Along with, too many actors wearing wigs that are visibly wigs (prime culprit: Michael Stuhlbarg, in a way too shiny mop, as the New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal).

We all know that in the end, President Richard Nixon resigns after the Watergate scandal. Well, “The Post” shows that by showing President Nixon calling somebody in the oval office telling him or her not to allow The Washington Post into the White House after they write the story about the Pentagon Papers, the ending scene shows a police officer investigating a disturbance in the Democratic National Headquarters (of course that was the Watergate scandal).   

The Post was a very intriguing movie because you never knew what Graham was going to do next. I’d give it a 9.5/10 on a scale because the plot flowed very well; the actors played their roles as realistically as possible. “The Post” was a very well written film and was really one of the best movies I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching.

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