Good Night, and Good Luck.

At CBS in the 1950s, the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and the producer Fred Friendly decide to go on air against Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist investigations. Almost all of the film happens in studio corridors, the edit room and at the broadcast desk. Network management, sponsor pressure and the team's own fear all work at once. George Clooney directed, wrote it with Grant Heslov and played Fred Friendly. David Strathairn plays Murrow. Clooney took one dollar for all three jobs. When an injury he could not insure stalled the production he mortgaged his house in Los Angeles to complete the 7 million dollar budget. The film went past 54 million worldwide. Its being in black and white is not a stylistic whim but a necessity. No actor plays McCarthy; the senator's own archive footage is used, and that footage exists only in black and white. The film was actually shot on colour stock and converted in post. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 93 percent. Roger Ebert found it nearly claustrophobic and wrote that the subject is not McCarthy's abuses but the process by which Murrow and his team brought him down. It received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Strathairn. There is criticism too. Jack Shafer in Slate called it hagiography, arguing that it oversimplifies McCarthy's fall and ignores declassified evidence confirming Soviet agents in government. Who it is for: viewers who like the history of journalism and political tension in a closed room. Who it is not for: anyone wanting the whole period. The film never leaves the newsroom and leaves the rest of the history outside.