The Post              5 stars

In my quest to see all Oscar nominated movies of last year I watched The Post, the Spielberg directed thriller drama about the Washington Post struggle to stay relevant in 1971 by reporting on the secrets revealed in the Pentagon Papers.  In this true story, the first woman major newspaper publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep) and the Post’s editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) must make the critical decisions about whether to publish the government secrets about the failures of the Vietnam War, risking the very future of the newspaper business.  This film was put together in near record time as the producers including Steven Spielberg wanted to make a movie that was very relevant to the relationship between Washington and the press of today.  The film pays great attention to detail and gets the feel of the newspaper business of the early seventies.  The newsrooms and printing press equipment are very authentic down to the metal desks and loud typewriters.  The drama brought to us by the acting skills of Streep and Hanks as well as the excellent supporting cast is compelling and will keep your attention throughout the movie’s run time.  The movie was written based on the memoirs of Graham, Bradlee and Daniel Ellsberg, thus it is very close to a representation of the true story.  It’s hard to imagine putting together a team of filmmakers more talented this this crew.  The Post may not have won best picture last year but it had to be in the running.  One interesting piece of trivia about the movie is that it took only nine months from putting the screenplay together until completion of the editing, which is close to a miracle in Hollywood.