Mr Jones

Historians have long known about the contrasting careers of journalists Gareth Jones and Walter Duranty, but the Soviet scandal that defined them has fallen from public consciousness. It's a shame then that their stories have been told with more care than imagination in Agnieszka Holland's biopic. First-timer Andrea Chalupa's screenplay starts stodgily, as it outlines how political adviser Jones (James Norton) is not only connected to ex-prime minister David Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham), but also inspired left-leaning novelist George Orwell (Joseph Mawle) to write Animal Farm. But Holland comes into her own as the scene shifts from claustrophobic rooms in Moscow to the vast white expanses of Ukraine. It is here that Jones discovers the Kremlin's role in the Holodomor famine that claimed upwards of ten million lives from 1932-33. Norton exudes courage and decency as the Welsh reporter dedicated to getting his scoop. But the drama loses much of its intrigue when it moves away from Duranty, the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning pioneer of fake news, who was known as "Stalin's apologist" and is played with compelling shiftiness by Peter Sarsgaard.