Young Stephen Glass was a “journalist” for the left-leaning The New Republic magazine. Intelligent but unprincipled, he fabricated a lot of his stories—the subject of the Billy Ray film Shattered Glass (2003), starring Hayden Christenson as Stephen.

How the man managed to get away with this for years I don’t know, but it is almost small potatoes since hardly anyone has ever read The New Republic or even most conservative publications. Still, I am curious whether the mag has always been duly concerned about the truth.

Ray’s movie is rather too grave and it does not properly track Glass’s complexity. Too, I think the critic Anthony Quinn is correct in asking, “what is the point of this movie?”