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An Officer and a Spy (2019)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
France's Dreyfus affair seen through Georges Picquart, the intelligence chief who found proof that the convicted Jewish captain was innocent, then watched the army try to silence him rather than admit it. Adapted from Robert Harris's novel, it is meticulous about uniforms, offices and forged files, which makes the opening stately but the cover-up chillingly plausible. Picquart's own antisemitism is kept in view rather than polished away, a fair touch in a film that could easily have made him a spotless hero. It won the César for best director, and Roman Polanski's own legal history has colored its reception for many viewers.
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Scandal (1989)
6.5/10on IMDb
Released
The first big-screen telling of the Profumo affair still has the most sympathetic Stephen Ward: John Hurt plays the society osteopath as charming, needy and finally abandoned by the powerful friends who enjoyed his parties. Joanne Whalley is Christine Keeler and Ian McKellen a stiff John Profumo. It covers the ground more succinctly than the 2019 series, which makes it the better choice for one evening, though its nightclub gloss and nudity now feel very late-eighties, and it leans firmly toward Ward's side of the story.
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The Trial of Christine Keeler (2019)
6.9/10on IMDb
First aired
The Profumo affair retold from Christine Keeler's side, over six episodes that follow her past the headlines and into the courtroom. Sophie Cookson gives Keeler wit and anger, James Norton's Stephen Ward is a colder figure than John Hurt's, and Ellie Bamber's Mandy Rice-Davies steals scenes. Opinions on fairness split: a writer who knew Keeler thought she would have approved, while one critic who knew Profumo argued it is unfair to him. Watch it after Scandal to see how much the same events change with the point of view.
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A Very English Scandal (2018)
7.6/10on IMDb
First aired
Hugh Grant plays Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party from 1967, and Ben Whishaw is Norman Scott, the man who said they had been lovers and whom Thorpe spent years trying to silence. The plot against Scott ended with a hired gunman shooting Scott's Great Dane, Rinka, and the series plays the whole affair as the black farce it partly was, with Grant superb as charm curdling into menace. Thorpe was acquitted in June 1979, and the drama treats that verdict as an indictment of the establishment. Events are compressed, though Thorpe's successor David Steel called it reasonably accurate in most respects.
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Chappaquiddick (2018)
6.4/10on IMDb
Released
Jason Clarke plays Ted Kennedy in the days after he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969, leaving Mary Jo Kopechne dead in the car and taking hours to report it. The film is best as a study of a political machine moving into damage control around a man who seems unsure whether he wants rescuing. Much of it hews close to the record, but treat its key scenes as one interpretation: it shows Kopechne alive and trapped, which nobody can know, and its scene with a furious Joe Kennedy Sr contradicts his nurse's account.
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Nixon (1995)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
Oliver Stone treats Watergate as the end point of a whole life of grievance, from a hard California boyhood to resignation. Anthony Hopkins neither looks nor sounds much like Nixon, and after a few minutes it stops mattering: the insecurity is unforgettable. It is the most ambitious of the Watergate dramas and the least reliable. Some historians now think its psychological reading holds up better than it seemed in 1995, but its hints at a link to the Kennedy assassination rest on innuendo. Watch it for the man, and the two Watergate series for the mechanics.
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Gaslit (2022)
7.3/10on IMDb
First aired
Julia Roberts plays Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Nixon's attorney general, who was by several accounts held and drugged in a Los Angeles hotel suite to stop her talking about Watergate. Grown out of the Slow Burn podcast, the series restores a woman history mostly remembered as a punchline. When it stays with Martha it is both accurate and gripping; even the moment a former FBI agent rips her phone out of the wall really happened. It strains when it winds other Watergate figures around her, and those strands are looser with the record.
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White House Plumbers (2023)
6.8/10on IMDb
First aired
Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux play E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the operatives behind the Watergate break-in, as a pair of deluded fantasists, and the joke is how little the comedy needs inventing. Liddy's famous candle trick is true, and Hunt and Liddy really did sit in a nearby hotel room in radio contact with the burglars. The series admits to fictionalized and composited scenes: the failed second break-in attempt and the raid on Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist are changed, and Lena Headey's Dorothy Hunt gets a wartime past that is hard to confirm. Still the best way into how Watergate actually happened.
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Stonehouse (2023)
6.8/10on IMDb
First aired
Matthew Macfadyen plays John Stonehouse, the Labour minister who vanished in November 1974, leaving a pile of clothes on a Miami beach, and turned up in Australia under a new identity. Written by John Preston, whose book became A Very English Scandal, this three-part drama plays it as farce, with Keeley Hawes as his long-suffering wife Barbara, and it is quick, funny and very watchable. The trade-off is depth: making Stonehouse a bumbling fool undersells a man later found to have been spying for the Czechs, and Sheila Buckley, who was part of the real story, called it hardly accurate at all.
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1987: When the Day Comes (2017)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
South Korea's military government tried to bury the death of student activist Park Jong-chul under police interrogation, planning to cremate him before an autopsy and calling it a heart attack, until a post-mortem found he had been asphyxiated. The exposure fed the June 1987 democracy uprising. Jang Joon-hwan's film hands the story like a baton between officials, a doctor, journalists and students, so it plays as a thriller about a whole society refusing to look away. Park's own death takes a back seat to the people who exposed it, and the finale goes for rousing emotion over restraint.
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The Front Runner (2018)
6.1/10on IMDb
Released
Hugh Jackman plays Gary Hart, the Democratic front-runner whose 1987 campaign collapsed after he dared reporters to tail him, they did, and a photograph of Donna Rice on his lap, both in Monkey Business shirts named after the yacht they had sailed on, surfaced. Hart and Rice both denied an affair, and the film declines to settle it, asking instead whether the press, the campaign or the candidate crossed the line first. Treat its newsroom scenes with care: the reporter who broke the story objected to his portrayal, calling his key phone call with the tipster the film's most glaring factual error.
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Il Divo (2008)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Paolo Sorrentino's portrait of Giulio Andreotti in the early 1990s, as decades of power begin to unravel under accusations from former insiders, plays like a dark opera with a pop soundtrack. Toni Servillo, transformed by makeup that earned an Oscar nomination, makes him a hunched, deadpan riddle who reveals almost nothing. It is stylized rather than documentary and takes a pointed view of allegations Andreotti always denied; he reportedly called it nasty and malicious. A little background on Italian politics of the period helps, because the film assumes you know who everyone is.
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Confirmation (2016)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
Kerry Washington plays Anita Hill and Wendell Pierce plays Clarence Thomas in HBO's film of the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Some of its most startling exchanges in the Senate are far from fiction. It does merge several real people into composite characters and leaves out other women who were ready to support Hill, and Thomas's allies called it biased, while Washington, also a producer, said it took no side. Pair it with Impeachment to compare how the capital handled misconduct claims seven years apart.
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American Crime Story (2016)
8.4/10on IMDb
First aired
Season 3: Impeachment (2021)
Beanie Feldstein plays Monica Lewinsky and Sarah Paulson plays Linda Tripp, the colleague whose secret recordings of their phone calls turned an affair with President Clinton into the case that led to his impeachment. Lewinsky was a producer, so the season is openly on her side, and it is strongest on how she was used by almost everyone around her. Many of its most salacious moments happened almost exactly as shown, and her grand jury testimony is accurate, but some private scenes between her and Clinton are invented, and so much rests on conflicting accounts that certainty is impossible.
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Official Secrets (2019)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
Keira Knightley plays Katharine Gun, a GCHQ translator who in 2003 leaked a US National Security Agency email asking Britain to help spy on six UN Security Council members in the run-up to the Iraq war. The Observer put it on its front page and she was charged under the Official Secrets Act, which offers no public-interest defense; at her trial in February 2004 the prosecution dropped the case within half an hour. It is a tense, grown-up procedural that commentators who followed the case found largely accurate, and it does not pretend to know why the case collapsed, because nobody has explained it.
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Fair Game (2010)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame, the CIA officer whose covert identity was exposed after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson (Sean Penn), publicly challenged a Bush administration case for the Iraq war. Doug Liman's film is strongest on the practical damage: an intelligence career ended overnight, contacts abroad left exposed and a marriage under public strain. It is built on Plame's and Wilson's own memoirs, so it is their version, and the accuracy of its wider picture is still disputed.
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The Report (2019)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Adam Driver plays Daniel Jones, the Senate staffer who led the study of the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, a report running to more than 6,700 pages. The film turns years of reading cables in a windowless room into a gripping procedural, and the real Jones worked with the filmmakers on it. A former CIA lawyer disputes key scenes, saying a night-time removal of the committee's servers never happened and that the two sides mostly worked well together. Watch it as an advocate's account of how the torture findings came to be published, and a very good one.
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