Nothing But the Truth.

"Despite an intriguingly familiar title and a story that hinges on a journalist at a powerful newspaper who is jailed for refusing to name her source, Nothing But the Truth has nothing to do with you know what or who," writes Manohla Dargis in, well, you know where. "To be honest, I was looking forward to watching a movie about Judith Miller, the former reporter from the New York Times who in 2005 was jailed for contempt of court after she refused to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Wilson (a k a Plame) as an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency.... I'm not really sure what [Rod] Lurie, whose previous films include The Contender, an exploration of female political power and its threat, believed he was saying in this new film. Nothing but the Truth has nothing much at all to do with the historical record, which wouldn't be bad if it offered something persuasive and worthwhile in return, like a reckoning of journalism and its abuses."

Updated through 12/20.

"Rather than Iraq and the nonexistent WMDs that Miller helped persuade the world were an imminent danger, the trigger is a would-be presidential assassination that, blamed on Venezuela, precipitates a US attack on Caracas," writes writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "After secret agent Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga) apparently leaks the information that the Venezuelan connection is bogus, journalist Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) scoops the world by identifying Van Doren as a spook. Adding to the fun, both women are soccer moms, whose kids attend the same DC school. The actresses are otherwise well-matched - sanctimonious Beckinsale is coltish yet stubborn; faintly ironic Farmiga tough but girlish."

"Lurie could rightly be accused of oversimplifying a knotty case to score points for embattled journalists, but goodness knows, the field could use a boost," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "But mostly, Nothing But the Truth operates a lot like Billy Ray's Shattered Glass and Breach, offering up the sort of no-nonsense, meat-and-potatoes docudrama that's in short supply these days."

"The film easily could have gotten saddled with liberal polemics and pedestrian plot twists, but Lurie's focus is on lean, intelligent storytelling while keeping his righteous anger worked seamlessly into plotting and character development," writes Jay Antani in Slant.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Lurie "about his roots in political life, the sudden collapse of the film's distributor, Yari Film Group, and his next project, a remake of Straw Dogs."

Earlier: David D'Arcy from Toronto.

Update, 12/18: "While my moviegoing companion dismissed Nothing But the Truth as 'a steaming pile of dung,' I felt compelled to defend the movie's odder moments, even as I simultaneously recognized it as a deeply flawed political drama," writes Ed Champion. "Beneath Nothing But the Truth's implausible and pleasantly preposterous politics beats the half-hidden heart of a perfectly respectable exploitation film."

"Instead of the tired national security vs freedom of speech debate, it'd be great to have a dialogue about the implied contractual nature of the Bill of Rights, about how our Founding Fathers likely expected some reasonably responsible behavior on the part of its citizenry in return for these rights carved out from the government." Jeff Reichert at indieWIRE: "This kind of complexity doesn't make for easy or exciting cinema, and ignoring a real, hard civics lesson is an obvious choice for a political thriller. This is Lurie's right. But that doesn't mean we need to like the results."

"Previously known for potboilers whose tone was just shy of hysterical (The Contender in particular), Lurie here takes a welcome step back from hyperbole," writes Chris Barsanti at Film Journal International. "He's produced a crisply shot drama that takes a tangled knot of issues and plays them out with a reasonable amount of realism."

Updates, 12/20: "Lurie spins off into invention like a Law & Order writer on deadline, scrambling the issues so thoroughly it's no longer clear what, if anything, the movie is meant to address," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times.

Brent Simon talks with Beckinsale for Vulture.

Posted by dwhudson at December 17, 2008 2:05 PM