Incredible accent work from Ben Whishaw here, amongst everything else. Always a pleasure to have a new Ira Sachs film, and this is an odd little egg. A quietly meditative film, almost a step removed from being slice of life, a recounting of a slice of life maybe. Oh how our lives expand when you stop to think about them.
The fun subtextual throughline of Cover Up is whether Seymour Hersh’s paranoia at being asked questions in this interview that he agreed to and continue to agree to is justified or not. A prickly participant in his own documentary, Hersh’s presence enlivens an otherwise solid documentary on the quite impressive array of major journalistic breaks he’s been responsible for, from war crimes in Vietnam to the abuse in Abu Ghraib.
Fun to see that Josh Safdie is the brother injecting the severe anxiety into the blood of the Safdie Brothers films. If not as much of a living panic attack as Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme is still cut from the same cloth, a frenetic film bouncing from catastrophe to catastrophe without let-up, all grounded by a compelling performance from Timothee Chalamet. What price glory indeed.
Certainly one of the films that I will have watched in 2026. I dunno, it’s a fun way to start the year. It’s all absolute hokum, of course, and it is massively skating on personality and cool visual location title cards, but the convoluted nature of the thing is fun, and Justice Smith is great in it and deserves all the roles he can get, so I’m perfectly happy with my choices here.