Looking For The Facts Behind The Fable

X-men, The Matrix and an angry green giant — all year long, pixel-pushing superheroes have been smashing their way across cinema screens. In Ireland, a quieter kind of crime fighter is pulling in the crowds: Cate Blanchett as Veronica Guerin, the Irish reporter who went head to head with Dublin's drug barons in the mid-'90s and paid for it with her life.

Veronica Guerin — the second film about the iconic journalist — follows her as she digs for the source of the city's drug supply. Hardheaded and hungry for a story, Guerin is threatened, shot...