Winter Garden Theatre, New York

The actor-director brings his 2005 drama to the stage, now playing the lead role, but while it’s timely and nicely staged, it feels stiff

Time has been kind to Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s sincere dramatization of the broadcaster Edward R Murrow’s on-air tangles with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Sleek, slim and reverent, the 2005 film recalled a time of both cultural panic and promise, before American attention splintered and television’s road forked toward cable news. In its own era, the movie played in implicit contrast to mainstream media’s failure to interrogate the Bush administration’s dubious justifications for the Iraq war. In 2025, well … now, as in 1953, the lies run rampant. But in Clooney’s stark black-and-white drama, truth prevails.

Wouldn’t that be nice. The ongoing lurch away from due process casts both a haunting pall and a self-congratulatory glow over New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, where Clooney leads a proficient, if stiff, Broadway adaptation of his directorial debut. The 63-year-old actor, who originally played Murrow’s comparatively warm producing partner Fred Friendly, steps into the shoes of the hardbitten broadcaster for his Broadway debut with a palpable sense of purpose. The show, one of a handful of starry, expensive productions this spring, at least has the argument of pressing relevance for exorbitant prices. The past week’s wave of government deportations and detentions, for “ties” to “terrorist groups” without evidence or trial, uncannily echo the McCarthy hearings that falsely accused government employees of colluding with the Communist party.

Dr Brian Morley claims Last Week Tonight host and show took his words out of context in a 2024 episode on Medicaid

A US healthcare executive has sued John Oliver for defamation following a Last Week Tonight episode on Medicaid, in which the British-American comedian quoted the doctor as saying it was okay for a patient with bowel issues to be “a little dirty for a couple of days”.

Dr Brian Morley, the ex-medical director of AmeriHealth Caritas, argues that Oliver – an outspoken comic whose show has not only addressed muzzling lawsuits but been subject to them – took the quote out of context in an April 2024 episode on Medicaid.

The long and often shocking journey to finding the alleged killer of young women in Long Island is brought to a wider audience in a damning new Netflix series

The film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer. Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls, an adaptation of Robert Kolker’s book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help.

It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa-based architect who regularly commuted to midtown Manhattan. Ryan had played Mari Gilbert, the late mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the early hours of 1 May 2010 after meeting a client on Long Island. Mari Gilbert relentlessly pressured the police to remember her daughter, who they dismissed as a prostitute on the run; it took eight months for Long Island authorities to begin a comprehensive search for her, finding instead the bodies of the so-called “Gilgo Four” – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, who went missing between July 2007 and September 2010. By spring 2011, authorities identified the remains of 10 possible victims of the same perpetrator. It was long suspected, based on cellphone data, that the killer lived in central Long Island and commuted to the city. In truth, Heuermann was a fairly successful architect who consulted on numerous buildings in New York – including Ryan’s home.

What does the attack on an Oscar-winning Palestinian director say about the situation in the West Bank today? Adrian Horton and Lorenzo Tondo report

Earlier this month, No Other Land won the Oscar for best documentary feature. The film chronicles the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta as it resists being driven off its land by settler violence and the demolitions of the Israeli military. The film’s two protagonists, Palestinian film-maker Basel Adra and Israeli film-maker Yuval Abraham, gave speeches when they accepted their award.

Yuval Abraham: “We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life … There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people.”