(watched sat/20230107-sun/20230108 via Peacock; directed by Maria Schrader from a script by Rebecca Lenkiewicz adapted from the book and New York Times investigation by Jodi Cantor and Meghan Twohy; starring Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, and Ashley Judd. Released 13 October 2022)

A powerful film that everyone should see brimming with phenomenal performances – especially Mulligan (my favorite performance Mulligan performance remains David Hare's 2018 BBC series COLLATERAL), Kazan, and Ehle – but a powerful film that should have been so much more.

Still trying to put my finger on it – writing this being a process of processing – but my current thinking is that it was the direction of the whole that left me wanting, an amplifcation of a powerful story but an amplifier with a flickering spark: I was hoping for the heir apparent to ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and SPOTLIGHT (perhaps my expectations were at fault?); certainly the source material, the most transformative and tectonic investigative reporting since the Boston Globe revealed the decades of child sex abuse allowed by centuries of systemic rot running rampant in the Catholic Church in 2002, warrants that treatment but – though Schrader's telling occasionally reached for it – SHE SAID never quite broke through its own restraint and left me wondering what a more visceral director like Lynne Ramsey, Mary Haron, Ava DuVernay, Kathryn Bigelow, Chloe Zao, Dee Rees, or Sam Taylor-Johnson would have done with the source material – if not with the script itself.