The Post

This is straight-down-the-line Oscar bait, between the prestigious topic (how journalists brought government secrets to the public despite the best attempts to supress them), the big name cast and director and the obvious relevance to contemporary events. But it's also effective as a reasonably taut moral thriller about what went on backstage to ensure that information-as-business continued successfully.

One might quibble a bit, for instance, that Meryl Streep is made a tad naive about the nature of the newspaper business largely so that she can have an arc of discovering her own power, and that perhaps the top end of the paper gets a lot more attention than the day-to-day journalists and the source of the leak, plus the ending plays a little too knowingly as a setup for the historical sequel that's already been filmed 40 odd years ago. But this is effective work - smart and intriguing and with Spielberg's natural sense for dramatic energy. It also picks the right place to start - not in Washington but in Vietnam, where the true impact of all these cover ups is felt in young men sent in to continue to fight a war their superiors already know is unwinnable. There's also a clever even-handedness in pointing out that neither political side has clean hands about Vietnam - that it was as much or more so Kennedy and Johsons's war as it was Nixon's.

This is the kinda thing that gets nominated for a bunch of oscars but probably won't win any. Which is to say it's middle-of-the road, but it knows how to drive that middle effectively and smartly.