Review of Mr Jones

A well-told tale about the Welsh reporter who broke the story about the 1930s famine in the Ukraine, when the rest of the Moscow-based western press corps didn't...because they were too lazy and supine, it's implied. There's a bit of a hint that they judged the Communists to be the lesser evil vs. the Nazis, and some of them probably did. One of the main characters is Walter Duranty, the New York Times bureau chief, who was actually even weirder than the he is portrayed in the film...he hung out with Aleister Crowley for a start. 

I understand the family of Gareth Jones were unhappy about some of the details, and it's perhaps not unreasonable to think about the wider context of the famine...the Soviet drive to industrialise, the scissors crisis during the early Soviet period ...and so on. Don't know whether he really met Eric Blair either...certainly Animal Farm wasn't written until after 1943 and Blair's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, which turned him into an anti-Stalinist, though the film implies that he was writing it during the 1930s as he met Gareth Jones.

But a decent film nonetheless, cinematically interesting and with decent acting and dialogue. Watched on BBC iPlayer.