"Don't I look calm?", Cate Blanchett's beleaguered news producer Mary Mapes tells her lawyer towards the end of Truth, James Vanderbilt's doggedly absorbing account of the scandal that hit CBS News in 2004, when it ran a 60 Minutes segment about George W Bush's Vietnam-era military record in the run-up to the Bush-Kerry election. Mapes's line prompts a laugh, not only in context - she's facing an internal review panel which could easily end her career - but as a wink towards Blanchett's acting. Calm is simply never her thing. That whirlwind intelligence of hers is constantly churning and flickering away.The film goes back to when Mapes first had the idea for a report but needed the sources to back it up. It was to investigate the "funky" vagaries of Bush's military career in the early 1970s, when, unlike John Kerry, he avoided the Vietnam draft by managing to be parachuted with suspicious ease into the Texas Air National Guard.Mapes and her team of researchers had barely a week to prepare their 60 Minutes segment, but got hold of some personal memos from Lieutenant Col Jerry B Killian, which appeared to criticise Bush's fly-by-night status.When their story broke, right-wing blogs were quick to dispute what could easily have been Microsoft Word forgeries put repeatedly through a photocopier.Blanchett makes us feel the creeping horror of professional disgrace, the fear and stigma. There's also a wicked shot, the film's best, of Mapes topping up her wine glass, and topping it more, and then right to the very brim, as George W Bush makes his inaugural second-term speech on TV. Truth has its share of problems, but it's admirably serious-minded about the means and ends of news provision, and about the clashing, deafening bias that afflicts it daily. - ©The Daily TelegraphWHAT OTHERS SAYBlanchett gives a bravura performance, but there has been no talk of Oscars. It's as if the film itself has become tainted in the same way as the careers of its real-life protagonists. - Geoffrey Macnab, independent.co.ukA compelling portrait of a driven, high-strung television journalist. - Stephen Holdenoct, nytimes.comWhy all the fakey melodrama? The honest details of this saga would've been enough. - Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com..