If you’ve seen Adam McKay‘s “Vice,” the portrait of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the movie may have given you some handy context you may have forgotten. No, acclaimed writer/director Scott Z. Burns‘ “The Report” is not a comedic, dark political satire, but it does spin-off from some of the events in that film. In “Vice,” it’s shown how Cheney is instrumental in finding any shred of information, credible or not, to help justify the war in Iraq in the early aughts. What followed was “enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA adopted post-911 as a way to glean information from captured suspects: torture essentially. In fact, Burns’ movie was originally called “The Torture Report,” and essentially it’s about the investigation into the techniques, the report itself and what the U.S. government did to help prevent the information from getting to the American public.
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Burns is primarily known as a writer, he’s worked extensively with Steven Soderbergh (“The Informant!,” “Contagion,” and “Side Effects“), most recently on his Panama Papers movie “The Laundromat,” wrote “The Bourne Ultimatum” and recently made headlines for being handsomely paid to fix the “Bond 25” script. But he’s also a director and producer too (he won an Academy Award for producing “The Inconvenient Truth“), having helmed projects like “Pu-239” and most recently, the pilot episode of “The Loudest Voice” for Showtime. “The Report” made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to much acclaim and created so much buzz it was bought by Amazon for a record $14 million — one of the highest buys out of Utah ever.
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Here’s the official synopsis from Sundance:
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Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) is assigned the daunting task of leading an investigation into the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. After analyzing extensive evidence, he learns about the “enhanced interrogation techniques”—proven to be brutal, immoral, and ineffective—that the CIA adopted after 9/11. When Jones and the Senate Intelligence Committee attempt to release the results from his investigation, however, the CIA and White House go to great lengths to prevent the truth from getting out.
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“The Report” stars Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Corey Stoll, Ted Levine, Maura Tierney, and Michael C. Hall. It’s going to make an international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall and is also expected to play at Telluride as well. Up until now, the drama didn’t have a release date, but with this new trailer that you can watch below, Amazon Studios have finally revealed the movie comes out on November 15 theatrically and then November 30 on Amazon Prime.
