‘The Stringer’ Review: Who Took the Historic Vietnam War Photo Known as ‘Napalm Girl’? A Riveting Documentary Says the Answer Lies in a Conspiracy

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Conspiracies and cover-ups are a dime a dozen in fictional movies (thrillers, political dramas, you name it).

But when a documentary unravels a conspiracy, it can take on the kind of hushed suspense those films used to have and rarely do anymore. (The heyday of conspiracy cinema, the ’70s era of “All the President’s Men” and “Chinatown” and “The Conversation” and “The Parallax View,” was about 10,000 conspiracy movies ago.) “The Stringer” is a documentary mystery about a deadly serious subject: the true authorship of the famous Vietnam War photograph, taken on June 8, 1972, in the town of Trảng Bàng, that showed the aftermath of a napalm attack — a 9-year-old girl named Phan Thį Kim Phúc running, naked, toward the camera, her arms outstretched like broken wings, her mouth open in a scream of agony.

She’d been burned all over her body (the shot shows four other children, clothed and running with her), and the photograph, from the moment it went out into the world and was viewed by billions, became known as “Napalm Girl.” It is one of the most iconic and devastating images of the horror of war ever seen. “Naplam Girl” is recognized to be a photograph of immeasurable historic importance, one that had a profound influence on people’s feelings about the Vietnam War. (It’s commonly said that the photo helped end the war; I would say that’s something of an overstatement.) But who took the photograph?

The morning after it was shot, when it was sent out from the Saigon office of the Associated Press, it was credited to Nick Út, a 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who was the AP’s local staff photographer.