Cover-Up
Release Date: December 5, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
86
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 19 Critic Reviews
Positive:
19
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Irish TimesTara BradyJan 2, 2026
At a moment when truth is increasingly relative, Cover-Up acknowledges the grim continuation of the state apparatus that Hersh first exposed in the aftermath of My Lai. Without journalists of his calibre, we’d be none the wiser. Read full review
100
Original-CinLiam LaceyDec 15, 2025
Watching each new documentary by Poitras (The Oath, Citizenfour All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), is to lock into a mental track, with a balance of structure and pace, coherence and surprise, intellectual and emotional engagement. Read full review
100
Little White LiesSophie Monks KaufmanDec 5, 2025
Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a flawed human rather than a bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it’s something called the truth. Read full review
91
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezDec 22, 2025
By the end, the movie’s harshest argument isn’t only that the government lies—it’s that ecosystems are built to manage the damage of those lies, from intelligence agencies to newsrooms to corporate interests that fear the truth like it’s an extinction event. Read full review
91
The Film StageSavina PetkovaSep 4, 2025
That most of Hersch’s breakthroughs have been, in one way or another, reported on and drowned out in the media noise is also quite telling: without overtly stating it, the film also undercuts the image of him as a journalistic messiah or prophet-of-sorts: he was simply more persistent. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 18, 2025
Cover-Up is a model of efficient, engaging documentary filmmaking; it looks good, for starters, and it moves energetically. Read full review
90
Screen DailyNikki BaughanSep 5, 2025
Cover-Up pays fitting tribute to a man who has made it his life’s work to seek out and expose the hardest of truths. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenSep 5, 2025
As a documentary subject, Hersh is thoroughly engaging — by turns charming, surly and vulnerable. He opens himself to the attention of filmmakers Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus with a sense of purpose, a bit of squirming, and occasional flares of regret. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineMarshall ShafferSep 6, 2025
Cover-Up is a sweeping, if tempered, tribute to investigative journalism, attesting to its enduring importance at a time when resources for it have substantially declined. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubKatarina DocalovichDec 19, 2025
At a time like this, Cover-Up is a vital reminder that demanding a better world is possible, straight from the people who have done the critical work required to confront America’s darkest forces. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 5, 2025
At a time when the American government is waging a sustained attack on investigative journalism, and on the very nature of truth itself, to watch Cover-Up is not just to wonder what they might be trying to hide, but also to recognize that we’ve seen it before. Read full review
80
Screen RantGregory NussenDec 15, 2025
Hersh and Poitras fit together like hand in glove. Exceptional warriors for absolute truth and justice, both have made careers out of exposing systemic abuses of power in ways that have often made them enemies of the state - and yet, both have been granted unusual access to the truth. Read full review
80
The TimesKevin MaherDec 12, 2025
It’s a sobering riposte to the clickbait era. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawDec 4, 2025
Hersh emerges as a tough, combative, peppery personality from this movie. Read full review
80
The GuardianAdrian HortonOct 9, 2025
Brisk, lucid and sweeping, Cover-Up assures that some, at least, will not. Read full review
80
VarietyOwen GleibermanSep 5, 2025
As Cover-Up reveals, the key lesson of Seymour Hersh’s career is that when it comes to crucial stories of corruption, just about every situation is layered, booby-trapped, woven with deception. Read full review
78
TheWrapBen CrollSep 5, 2025
The result is an always engaging, sometimes enraging, and occasionally revelatory doc, stretching from Civil Rights to Substack, that every so often reveals something more jarringly (and appealingly) adversarial. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyDec 19, 2025
By putting the garrulous, sometimes cranky Hersh on film, “Cover-Up” reveals, in the behavioral sense, the obsessiveness that makes an investigative journalist. Read full review
70
Next Best PictureCody DericksSep 5, 2025
Cover-Up is an overall captivating, invigorating watch. Without editorializing too obviously, Poitras and Obenhaus have created an incredibly impactful and, at times, infuriating look at America’s history of violent imperfection, showing that when it comes to holding our nation accountable, journalists like Seymour Hersh are an absolute necessity. Read full review
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