5 Movies a Journalist Student Must Watch

Everyone loves to watch movies. Bollywood, Hollywood and so on. They entertain us; explore us to delve into deep thoughts. Newspapers and newspapermen have long been favorite subjects for moviemakers and there are some unique movies worth for a journalist. Here are five movies a journalist student must watch before he/she enters into the field of reporting or photojournalism or broadcast media.

1.   Frost Nixon, Directed by Ron Howard 

A dramatic enactment of the post-Watergate television interviews held between British talk-show host David Frost and former president Richard Nixon.

The film tells the story behind the Frost/Nixon interviews of 1977. The film received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

Nixon was thought to have destroyed by Watergate and interred by the Frost interviews.

Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon” is a somewhat fictionalized version of the famous 1977 interviews, all the more effective in taking the point of view of the outsider, the “lightweight” celebrity interviewer, then in his own exile in Australia. Precisely because David Frost (Michael Sheen) was at low ebb professionally and had gambled all his money on the interviews, his POV enhances and deepens the shadows around Nixon (Frank Langella). This story could not have been told from Nixon’s POV because we would not have cared about Frost.

The film begins as a fascinating inside look at the TV news business and then tightens into a spellbinding thriller.

2.  Shattered Glass

Shattered Glass is a 2003 American-Canadian drama film written and directed by Billy Ray. The screenplay is based on a September 1998 Vanity Fair article by H. G. Bissinger. In it he chronicled the rapid rise of Stephen Glass’ journalistic career at The New Republic during the mid-1990s and his steep fall when his widespread journalistic fraud was exposed.

As everyone discussing “Shattered Glass” is bound to observe, there are obvious parallels between Mr. Glass’s behavior and that of Jayson Blair, the reporter who was found last spring to have invented or plagiarized portions of at least three dozen articles in The New York Times.

3. All the President’s Men

Newspapers and newspapermen have long been favorite subjects for movie makers—a surprising number of whom are former newspapermen, yet not until “All The President’s Men,” the riveting screen adaptation of the Watergate book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, has any film come remotely close to being an accurate picture of American journalism at its best.

During the 1972 elections, reporter Bob Woodward covers what seems to be a minor break-in at the Democratic Party National headquarters. Certain lawyers, names and addresses make him suspicious.

“All The President’s Men,” directed by Alan J. Pakula, written by William Goldman and largely pushed into being by the continuing interest of one of its stars, Robert Redford, is a lot of things all at once: a spellbinding detective story about the work of the two Washington Post reporters who helped break the Watergate scandal, a breathless adventure that recalls the triumphs of Frank and Joe Hardy in that long-ago series of boys’ books, and a vivid footnote to some contemporary American history that still boggles the mind.

4. The Killing Fields, Director: Roland Joffé

Sydney Schanberg is a New York Times journalist covering the civil war in Cambodia with local representative Dith Pran. Schanberg won’t have trouble leaving the country but it isn’t the same for Pran.

Unfortunately there’s little wit on show in this telemovie, which, despite some gorgeous cinematic flourishes, is a bit short on narrative technique and ambiguities of character. There’s a slick competence about it — vivid small-town iconography from director of photography Toby Oliver and a superb score from Basil Hogios and Caitlin Yeo.

5. The Insider

The true story of Jeffery Wigand, the former head of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who went live on television to expose the bitter truth of how tobacco companies function.

The Insider is a 1999 American drama film directed by Michael Mann, based on the true story of a 60 Minutes segment about Jeffrey Wigand, a whistleblower in the tobacco industry. The 60 Minutes story originally aired in November 1995 in an altered form because of objections by CBS' then-owner, Laurence Tisch, who also controlled the Lorillard Tobacco Company. The story later aired in a complete and uncensored form on February 4, 1996.

It was nominated for seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Russell Crowe), Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Sound and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published.