Film & Television

John Maguire on film: Reality check on how law enforcement in America really works

Taut, elegant thriller Reality sweeps away all of our quaint notions of the reading of rights and upfront questioning of a suspect

Sydney Sweeney stars as Reality Winner, a translator accused of leaking a classified report on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election

We’ve all grown up with depictions of the FBI arresting the bad guys in film and television. We’re intimately familiar with the procedures: the flipped badge, the recited rights, the handcuff’s final click. Call it the Hawaii Five-0 Effect.

Real life, needless to say, is nothing like the movies. Reality, the debut feature from playwright Tina Satter, hews closely to the recorded truth of how the US federal law enforcement agency arrested Reality Winner (yes, ...