At the Heart of Gold (2019)

This HBO documentary by Erin Lee Carr unpacks the scandal that shocked the world in 2016, when it came out that the US national gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar had been sexually abusing the young athletes in his care for decades.

The survivors get a platform to tell their stories in this unflinching documentary, which also deals with the cover up of the scandal and its aftermath. And it never lets us forget that Nassar wasn’t the only person who was culpable in the scandal – the institutions that protected him and put winning ahead of everything, including the welfare of its athletes, ought to be accountable, too.

The New York Times writes, “It’s a chilling reminder that real predators rarely look and act like movie monsters” while The Guardian says, “The 88-minute film succeeds where mainstream media too often failed… making full use of its feature-length canvas in pulling together the many complex threads of a story that was always bigger, and more sinister, than a single monster.”