‘Cold Copy’ Review: A Satisfying Media Noir For The Fox News Age – Tribeca Film festival

deadline.com:

In the proliferation of subgenres, the media noir is perhaps the rarest. From the ’50s alone, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps, and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success spring to mind.

Just lately, with the exception of Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014), there hasn’t been too much evidence of a renaissance, but Roxine Hellberg’s satisfying feature debut taps back into the same dark wells of oral ambivalence corruption and power, casting the excellent Bel Powley as a journalism student who will do whatever it takes to make it in the cut-throat world of TV news broadcasting.

It’s possible that the media noir was supplanted by the white-knight school of journalism movies, which has been going strong since All the President’s Men (1976) and struck Oscar gold as recently as 2015’s Spotlight But that was in the dinosaur print era, and Cold Copy takes place in the bright light of the brave new world of viral news, social media pile-ons and OnlyFans celebrities.

Mia Scott (Powley) knows the golden age is over when she takes on a postgrad degree focusing on investigative technique. Her tutor tells her as much, saying, “Journalists with degrees make less than girls posting from their bedrooms about succulents and kombucha.” Mia’s tutor is Diane Heger (Tracee Ellis Ross), the host of The Night Report (TNR) and a hard-nosed news reporter who gives her students a tough time — and Mia the toughest time of all.