Shattered Glass

Right now you can watch Shattered Glass in Australia on Hoopla, and in the US on Starz Apple TV Channel and Kanopy — and it holds up to as much attention as you give it. The length is exactly right for the story it is telling — nothing rushed, nothing dragged out. With 476 viewer ratings on TMDB, this is not a title flying under the radar. Hayden Christensen leads a cast that never overplays its hand. Start it on Hoopla whenever you need something guaranteed to land.

Part of the current wave of titles people are actually watching, Shattered Glass earns its spot. Shattered Glass takes its time building the world its characters inhabit, and the patience pays off. Stephen Glass is a staff writer for the respected current events and policy magazine The New Republic and a freelance feature writer for publications such as Rolling Stone, Harper's and George. By the mid-90s, Glass' articles had turned him into one of the most sought-after young journalists in Washington, but a bizarre chain of events - chronicled in Buzz Bissinger's September 1998 Vanity Fair article - suddenly stopped his career in its tracks. Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard lead a cast that brings real weight to the material. It was released in 2003. What elevates Shattered Glass is a refusal to let any character off the hook too easily. It delivers reliably on what it promises, which is more than most of its competition manages.

For anyone looking for storytelling that takes its characters seriously, Shattered Glass delivers. It has built its own audience without needing a direct comparison. A contained runtime means every scene is doing real work. Hayden Christensen carries the material with a performance that rewards close attention. Worth starting sooner rather than later.