The re-enacted downfall of up-and-coming journalist Stephen Glass, twenty-seven of whose forty-one pieces for The New Republic in the mid-Nineties turned out to have been fabricated in whole or in part. No great shakes as a movie, clumping along in the talking-heads style of a TV docudrama, the writing and directing debut of Billy Ray, adapted from a Vanity Fair article by H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger, is nonetheless a painless and often quite pleasurable way to bone up on the material: you don't even have to move your eyes. There is ample suspense in the layer-by-layer unmasking. (Glass's first line of defense is his stock disarmament ploy, "Are you mad at me?" Next line of defense: he was duped. Next line of defense: he got the story secondhand.) And there is heroism as well, all the more impressive for the lone hero's unpreparedness and unsuitedness: Peter Sarsgaard, as the friendless editor in charge of the in-house investigation, is properly unimposing and put-upon. And there's a goosebump-raising emotional payoff when the editor finally lays down the journalistic law to one of Glass's die-hard defenders (the miraculously unaffected Chloë Sevigny). And while, on the face of it, the story is not as earth-shaking as that of (everyone's favorite reference point) All the President's Men, it still has much to say about the state of American journalism in particular, its insidious slide toward "entertainment," its blurring of the line between reporting and coloring, and about the state of American culture in general: the culture of lying and cheating and getting ahead no matter how. If those subjects are not earth-shaking, they are at any rate earth-eroding. With Hayden Christensen, Hank Azaria, Steve Zahn, Rosario Dawson. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd