Kill the Messenger (2014)
Directed by Michael Cuesta
A reporter becomes the target of a vicious smear campaign that drives him to the point of suicide after he exposes the CIA's role in arming Contra rebels in Nicaragua and importing cocaine into California. Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb.
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What critics compared Kill the Messenger to
The movie, based on a true story, lacks the emotional resonance of similarly themed films such as “All the President’s Men” and “The Insider,” but it’s a story worth telling, even if all the pieces aren’t there.
The second finds him going for a meager version of “The Insider.”
The crusading journalist has been a mainstay of thrillers—some depicting real events, some not—through out the post-Watergate era, in films starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford (“All the President’s Men”), Warren Beatty (“The Parallax View”), James Woods (“Salvador”), Mel Gibson (“The Year of Living Dangerously”), Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington (“The Pelican Brief”), Al Pacino (“The Insider”), Robert Downey, Jr., and Jake Gyllenhaal (“Zodiac”), Russell Crowe (“State of Play”), and many others.
The closest parallel is Russell Crowe in The Insider, except Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand is a source who has a dogged journalist (Al Pacino’s Lowell Bergman) fighting for him.
Kill the Messenger doesn’t have the level of elegance and taut excitement of such exposé classics as All the President’s Men, The Insider or Erin Brockovich .
Films like All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and The Insider are a few examples.