Steven Spielberg directs Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in The Post, a thrilling drama about the unlikely partnership between The Washington Post's Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents. The two must overcome their differences as they risk their careers - and their very freedom - to help bring long-buried truths to light. The Post marks the first time Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg have collaborated on a project. In addition to directing, Spielberg produces along with Amy Pascal and Kristie Macosko Krieger. The script was written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, and the film features an acclaimed ensemble cast including Alison Brie, Carrie Coon, David Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Jesse Plemons, Matthew Rhys, Michael Stuhlbarg, Bradley Whitford and Zach Woods. ||||| "The Post " is kind of like the Yankees of movies. A Steven Spielberg directed film about the Pentagon Papers starring Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and a murderer's row of all your favorite television character actors (Jesse Plemons! Bob Odenkirk! Carrie Coon! Sarah Paulson!)? It doesn't even seem fair. Is there any way it wouldn't be great or least very good? 
 
 That Spielberg shot and is releasing it in under a year was perhaps the only potential handicap. Would it feel rushed? Unfinished? Eastwood-ian? The astonishing thing is that while there are a few clunkers (as if a parody, the film actually opens in Vietnam to the sound of helicopters and Creedence Clearwater Revival), on the whole "The Post" is meat and potatoes Spielberg in the best possible way. 
 
 He is directing off of a script from first time screenwriter Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, who also wrote the investigative journalism drama "Spotlight." Instead of a deep dive into the reporting that led to the Pentagon Papers being exposed, "The Post" focuses in on the Washington Post executives who risked everything to make it happen. The reporting here is the side story. 
 
 Streep plays Katharine Graham, the new publisher of The Washington Post, who is taking her family's paper public in an effort to save it. Hanks is the editor Ben Bradlee, who is trying to elevate it from hometown rag to national necessity on par with The New York Times. We meet them both at an interesting moment, when the most pressing matter is that they've been banned from covering Tricia Nixon's wedding and that the style coverage is perhaps a little too snarky for the sensibilities of D.C. society ladies. Then The New York Times comes out with their first story about the damning Vietnam report and, well, everything changes. 
 
 The film actually begins on Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) in Vietnam, and the moment he decides that he can't handle the lies of Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), who in private says that things are devolving in the war, but then boasts to the press that things are improving. Spielberg takes us along as Ellsberg steals the reports and starts the long and tedious process of copying them (somehow Spielberg is able to make even a copy machine seem thrilling). Indeed, while "The Post" is not much more than people talking, Spielberg infuses every scene with tension and life and the grandeur of the ordinary that he's always been so good at conveying. 
 
 And while there is an interesting tick tock of will-they-won't-they publish the papers that propels the film forward, at the heart of the story is Graham, an obviously smart and capable woman who is full of doubt, and is doubted by nearly everyone around her. Her father had given the paper to her husband and when he died, she took control. As she tells her daughter (Alison Brie) midway through the film, when she took control, she was a middle-aged woman who had never held a job. Streep plays her with daring reserve, as she finds herself unable to speak in key meetings, or stand up for herself as her board of directors is disrespecting her in earshot. 
 
 Hanks, meanwhile is having a ball as Bradlee, a charming and crass cad with a mission and an army of capable and doting reporters around him trying their best to get the story. Bradlee and Graham clash as editors and publishers do, but there is a foundation of respect there too and it is a joy to watch Hanks and Streep share the screen. 
 
 Hannah and Singer's script is always interesting, and delves into fascinating topics including the casual sexism of the time, and the often too close relationships between D.C. journalists and the subjects they're supposed to cover. That we get to see Streep and Hanks delivering the lines is almost just an added bonus. 
 
 "The Post," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "for language and brief war violence.: Running time: 115 minutes. Three stars out of four. 
 
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 MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. 
 
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 Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr ||||| Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” throttles along in a pleasurably bustling, down-to-the-timely-minute way. It’s a heady, jam-packed docudrama that, with confidence and great filmmaking verve (though not what you’d call an excess of nuance), tells a vital American story of history, journalism, politics, and the way those things came together over a couple of fateful weeks in the summer of 1971. That’s when The New York Times, followed by The Washington Post, published extensive excerpts from the Pentagon Papers: the top-secret government history of the Vietnam War that revealed, for the first time, the lies told to the American people about U.S. involvement in Indochina dating back to 1945. (Most destructive lie: the hiding of the fact that U.S. leaders knew the war was a losing battle.) 
 
 The heart of the movie is set at the Post, where the paper’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), with his urbane rasp, aristocrat-in-shirt-sleeves mystique, and a bite more forceful than his bark, and Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep), the paper’s wily socialite patrician publisher, square off like a couple of sparring partners who won’t let the fact that they’re on the same side stop them from taking a punch. Both of them want a great newspaper, one that will shake off its image as a “local paper” and do more than make headlines; they want it to make history. But they disagree on how to get there. The rascally Bradlee is like the prim and proper Graham’s id: She hired him, but can’t decide whether to encourage or repress him. Their contentious camaraderie is highly entertaining, and so is the whole movie, which pulses ahead like a detective yarn for news junkies, one that crackles with present-day parallels. 
 
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 In 1971, following the public revelation of the Pentagon Papers, both the Times and the Post stood tall against an injunction, filed by the Nixon White House, to cease publication of the classified documents — an attempt at legal clampdown that could well have snuffed the Fourth Estate as we know it. “The Post” offers not so much a message as a warning: that freedom of the press is a fight that never stops, and that the force that keeps it going is the absolute die-hard belief in that freedom. When the press begins to accept restrictions, however grudgingly, it’s all but inviting itself to be muzzled. 
 
 That’s a lesson that has rarely needed to be heard as much as it does today. “The Post” is a movie of galvanizing relevance, one that’s all but certain to connect with an inspiringly wide audience (I predict a $100 million gross) and with the currents of awards season. That said, it’s a potently watchable movie that isn’t quite a work of art. Two of Spielberg’s recent history films were also made in a messianic spirit of topical fervor: “Munich,” a dread-inflected thriller that addressed the post-9/11 world, and “Lincoln,” a kind of dramatized time machine that commented on our own increasingly fractious and divided political arena. Yet both those films had a depth and mystery and power that transcended the moment; you could watch them 20 years from now and they would still echo. “The Post,” written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer in a mode that’s bounding and busy and a little too expository, is a more pointedly utilitarian, less imaginative movie — it’s high-carb docudrama prose rather than poetry. You can be stirred by what it’s saying and still feel that when it’s over, the film declares more than it reverberates. 
 
 The gold standard for this sort of true-life journalistic muckraker is, of course, “All the President’s Men,” a movie that took place in the ’70s, was made in the ’70s, and tapped the alternating current of corruption and idealism that helped define the ’70s. “The Post,” by contrast, seems to be set in some fetishistic museum-piece re-creation of the ’70s, with every drag on a cigarette calling too much attention to itself (yes, a lot of people smoked — but where’s the smoky air hanging in the rooms?), too many “casually” signposted references to dinner-party mainstays like “Scotty” Reston and Lawrence Durrell, and too many actors wearing wigs that are visibly wigs (prime culprit: Michael Stuhlbarg, in a way too shiny mop, as the New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal). And why does Bruce Greenwood, generally an actor of supreme subtlety, blare his lines and pop his eyes as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the secretly doubting hawk who commissioned the Pentagon study and then made the strategic mistake of letting someone like Daniel Ellsberg read it? 
 
 The film opens with Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys with a fine, forlorn rabbinical iciness, typing notes in the Vietnam combat field, then listening to McNamara on the plane ride back explain that the war is going terribly — only to watch him turn around and play the war’s booster at an airport press conference. Ellsberg is disgusted by the two faces of American policy. A research associate at the Rand Corporation, he has access to all 7,000 pages of the study, which he has spent months smuggling out, photocopying, and slipping to reporter Neil Sheehan of the Times. 
 
 Ben Bradlee can smell something is up — he’s noticed that Sheehan hasn’t had a by-line in three months — and the film hooks you with Bradlee’s cussed old-school fervor, which takes the form of his brazen desire to compete with the Times. When he and two of his reporters first see the Pentagon Papers story on a newsstand, learning about it along with everyone else, Bradlee knows how historically vital it is — but he also knows that he’s been scooped. Hanks doesn’t quite have the bone-dry gin-martini brittleness that Jason Robards summoned so memorably in “All the President’s Men,” and Hanks’ regional inflections come and go (the actor lends a Boston vowel to every 10th line or so). But he nails Bradlee’s wry and jaded WASP-renegade charisma — the star editor’s nose for truth that emerges from his acceptance of how scuzzy the world is, and how badly it needs to have the light shined on it. Despite a White House ban, Bradlee refuses to take the acerbic Judith Martin (Jessie Mueller) off the Tricia Nixon wedding, and that minor decision reflects his core values. He’s a player who’s not going to play ball. 
 
 “The Post” has some good tense scenes set in the analog era of reporting, notably when Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk), the harried Post reporter with a long-time connection to Ellsberg, hunts him down using multiple pay phones, then flies to Washington with the boxed papers in their own special seat. The shoe-leather dimension of reporting has always been more dramatic than contemporary scenes of investigators staring into their computer terminals. 
 
 At the same time, part of what rescues the movie from any vestige of preachiness is that it’s framed as a business drama. Streep’s Graham, who inherited the publisher’s mantle after her husband’s suicide, is about to take the family newspaper public, and much is made of the share price: Will it will be $24.50 or $27? That could make a difference of $3 million, which would pay for 25 reporters’ jobs. In its wonky way, “The Post” touches the first moment when people realized that American newspapers were not necessarily a growth industry. Graham’s belief — idealistic but also prophetic — is that it will be the quality of newspapers, their influence, that allows them to flourish. Streep, speaking in an imperious nasal singsong, makes Graham irresistibly knowing yet, beneath the tea-party bluster, secretly unsure of herself: the only woman in a boardroom of men, and therefore an executive who has to fly solo to find her own way. 
 
 Complicating matters is the fact that she’s close friends with Robert McNamara. Once the Pentagon Papers story breaks, will the Post go easy on him? Or will Graham follow through on Bradlee’s request and exploit the friendship to get their own copy of the papers? The answers are: No and no. But these conversations are riveting, because they transport us back to an exotic age when editors and politicians didn’t regard themselves as adversaries; they were all on the side of America. “The Post” is about how and why that era had to end. Bradlee, a former pal of JFK’s, also played the game of rubbing elbows with power. But now, disgusted by the lies revealed in the Pentagon Papers, he enunciates the new credo. “We have to be a check on their power,” he says. “If we don’t, who will?” 
 
 The movie becomes a multi-stranded tale of journalistic triumph, with Graham movingly arriving at the realization that she’s not just the caretaker of her late husband’s company; it’s her company. The decision to publish the Papers becomes nothing less than an assertion of democracy, made all the more potent when newspapers across the land publish in solidarity. The press — the media — becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But that’s because it always was. The Pentagon Papers marked an iconic moment in American history: the press claiming its own freedom to call out the excesses of power. “The Post” celebrates what that means, tapping into an enlightened nostalgia for the glory days of newspapers, but the film also takes you back to a time when the outcome was precarious, and the freedoms we thought we took for granted hung in the balance. Just as they do today. ||||| If you were a kid in the 1960s or ‘70s, perhaps even as late as the ‘90s, and your parents took a newspaper, you probably saw that paper as a grown-up thing. This was where adults went to get important and trustworthy information about the world. Therefore, newspapers would always be there—for them to die was unimaginable. 
 
 The unimaginable has nearly happened, and we’ve all heard the reason: The old model of advertising is unsustainable in the age of the Internet, or some variation thereof. But none of that explains away the need for what reporters do. The Post, Steven Spielberg’s account of the Washington Post’s risky decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, is set in 1971, yet it’s an example of old-school filmmaking that’s modern at its core. It’s a reflection of all we stand to lose if news reporting and the outlets that support it should vanish, especially in the face of a President who strives daily to crush it. It’s the story of a woman, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham—played here in a striking performance by Meryl Streep—who had to fight for respect at a paper she actually owned. And even if its goals are lofty, the movie is so fleet and entertaining that you never feel you’re being lectured to. This is a superhero movie for real grownups. 
 
 When Daniel Ellsberg, at the time a Defense Department analyst, leaked classified information pertaining to the Vietnam War to the New York Times, the Nixon White House was so enraged that it sought, and secured, a temporary court order barring the Times from publishing further excerpts from the documents. The Post, written by first-time screenwriter Liz Hannah and Josh Singer (Spotlight), details the role of the Washington Post as that story began to expand and explode—which happened to coincide with the paper’s stressful preparations for an IPO, endangering the institution’s very survival. 
 
 At the center of this swirl were Katharine Graham, who had been managing the company since her husband, Philip Graham, had committed suicide eight years earlier, and Post editor Ben Bradlee (here played by a marvelous, growly Tom Hanks), whom Graham had hired in 1968, a longtime newsman who either fit the profile of the cantankerous, visionary newspaper editor or helped shape it, depending on your perspective. In an early scene, when the two meet for one of their customary breakfast meetings, the air around the table vibrates with their affable contentiousness. “Katharine, keep your finger out of my eye,” Bradlee blurts out when he thinks Graham has pushed an editorial suggestion too hard. She backs down with a girlishly innocent glance that indicates she hasn’t backed down at all. This is a woman who has worked hard at finding ways to get men to listen to her. She understands the value of a cagy, temporary retreat. 
 
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 The high drama of The Post begins with Bradlee’s fuming resentment of the New York Times after it drops Ellsberg’s bombshell, though at that time, of course, no one knew that Ellsberg (played here, with muted, matter-of-fact intensity, by Matthew Rhys) was the source of the leak. “Anyone else tired of reading the news instead of reporting it?” Bradlee says, addressing no one in particular in his newsroom, but knowing full well that every one in it already feels that mix of shame, envy, and ambition common to all newspeople. The one who seems least flashy of all, Ben Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk, in a superb performance that’s as offhandedly rumpled as the nondescript shirts he wears) will be the one to reel in the Post’s big scoop, by obtaining the Pentagon Papers themselves from Ellsberg. Some of the movie’s most dramatic, and funniest, moments take place at an outdoor bank of payphones, where Bagdikian juggles loose change, dangling receivers and semi-memorized phone numbers as he works that quotidian magic known as great journalism. 
 
 Spielberg and ace cinematographer Janusz Kaminski get the visual details of the era just right: A faint scrim of cigarette smoke hangs around a group of journalists as they pull off a Herculean eight-hour feat. Graham’s outfits, by veteran costume designer Ann Roth, evoke a sense of prim clout—her ladylike suits both command respect and render her almost transparent, as if they were the components of a subconscious stealth mission. In the early 1970s, this was how a woman dressed when she needed to get things done. 
 
 In The Post, everything Graham does is in response to a man, or, more specifically, to something a man is trying to make her do. In real life, Graham was a rich girl, the daughter of the Post’s owner, Eugene Meyer. When Meyer died, he left the paper to his son-in-law, Philip Graham, rather than to his daughter. That move wasn’t, and wasn’t considered, a slap in the face to his own offspring. It was simply the way things were done. 
 
 In The Post, we see Graham’s vulnerability, the way she needs to be coached by her friend and adviser Fritz Beebe (Tracy Letts), the Post’s chairman, in preparation for the company’s IPO, and the way her composure crumbles when she’s called upon to explain the paper’s mission and strategy in an important meeting—a roomful of men, naturally. We see how her close friend Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood) tries to subtly manipulate her as she wrestles with the decision to publish the Papers—the revelations they contain will permanently tarnish him. And although Nixon appears in the movie only as a shadowy profile, he too seeks to intimidate Graham. This was business as usual. At every turn, there was a man ready to undermine her authority. 
 
 Streep is revered for her great-lady acting, but she’s always freshest, and most alive, in comedy. Her performance here is terrific because it’s a whirlwind eddy of both. You never know when she’s going to make an authoritative declaration or crack a sly, witty joke. When Graham takes a crucial phone call—while wearing a milky-white eveningwear caftan, having just been called away from the party she’s hosting—there’s a moment of hesitancy, as if she isn’t completely sure she’s about to do the right thing. In deciding to publish the Pentagon Papers, Graham put her paper at risk and defied a bullying president. She also exposed the ways in which the United States government, through the course of several administrations, had lied to its own people. 
 
 When Streep’s Graham renders her decision during that phone call, her voice is somehow feathery and flinty at once, but there’s no mistaking its conviction. It’s as if, in that moment, Graham was at first only seeing a future, until she realized she could instead shape one. The Post is the story of a legacy, but it’s also a rallying cry. Graham couldn’t, not even in her superhero caftan, ensure the survival of all newspapers, but she knew what journalism meant to democracy. In print or in pixels, today it still means the same. 
 
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– Steven Spielberg signed on to The Post in March. Just nine months later, the film chronicling the Washington Post's publishing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 is hitting theaters at what some critics argue is the perfect time. It has a solid 85% "fresh" rating from critics at Rotten Tomatoes, vs. 69% from audiences. Samples: "The Post is the rare Hollywood movie made not to fulfill marketing imperatives but because the filmmakers felt the subject matter had real and immediate relevance to the crisis both society and print journalism find themselves in right now," writes Kenneth Turan at the Los Angeles Times. "It's a risky venture that succeeds across the board," he adds, applauding Meryl Streep for the "remarkable" way she conveys the essence of Post owner Katharine Graham. Stephanie Zacharek says Streep is "terrific" in "a superhero movie for real grownups." It's "a reflection of all we stand to lose if news reporting and the outlets that support it should vanish, especially in the face of a President who strives daily to crush it," yet "the movie is so fleet and entertaining that you never feel you're being lectured to." At Time, Zacharek also commends visuals fitting of the 1970s. Owen Gleiberman at Variety thinks the visuals supply only "some fetishistic museum-piece re-creation of the '70s." And though the film's "warning" about restrictions on the press "has rarely needed to be heard as much as it does today," he finds it "declares more than it reverberates." Still, The Post is a "potently watchable" and "highly entertaining" movie that benefits from the "contentious camaraderie" of Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, played by Tom Hanks. Watching Streep and Hanks interact is a "joy," but The Post is "meat and potatoes Spielberg in the best possible way," writes Lindsey Bahr at the AP. The director "infuses every scene with tension and life" so he's "able to make even a copy machine seem thrilling," she writes. Bahr also gives kudos to screenwriters Liz Hannah and Josh Singer for an "always interesting" script that "delves into fascinating topics including the casual sexism of the time."