Breaking the silence: movies grapple with the #MeToo movement

The beginning of the #MeToo movement, as a cultural reckoning on endemic sexual misconduct and abuse, can be roughly dated by the click of a mouse. On 5 October 2017, the New York Times published an investigation into the film producer Harvey Weinstein, a Hollywood titan with a decades-long history of systemic abuse, triggering an outpouring of recrimination and recognition on and offline. (The phrase #MeToo was coined over a decade earlier by activist Tarana Burke, as a way for Black women to share their stories of sexual violence.)

That first moment – reporters and editors hovering around a computer screen, cursor lingering on the “publish” button – is the narrative climax of , a new film adaptation of reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book on the Weinstein investigation. Five years after the start of the movement,