Sisoy Salas (John Arcilla), the once-idealistic co-founder of a now-struggling newspaper committed to reporting the truth, has left this tough and thankless profession for the easy task of shilling for the government a beloved radio host in the municipality of La Paz, he stoutly defends the equally beloved mayor Pedring Eusebio (Dante Rivero) on matters of both policy and personality, peddling unabashed and blatant falsehoods about the latterвЂ™s superficially anti-crime record.Д®usebio, however, is anything but anti-crime, having amassed great political heft through the multiple crime syndicate networks he shrewdly employs under the radar, chief among which is an extrajudicial arrangement for incarcerated prisoners to perform contract killings of the regimeвЂ™s unsavoury opponents (the rationale being that such prisoners are mostly anonymous and run little risk of spilling the beans). Picking up where On the Job left off, in the aftermath of a losing battle with the countryвЂ™s sheltered elite, The Missing 8 continues the good fight doggedly, chronicling a corrupt journalistвЂ™s pursuit of justice against the very institutional rot that served his personal interests up to the murder and disappearance of his colleagues. Clocking in at 208 minutes, still comfortably within polite societyвЂ™s durational tolerance, the film doubles down on its exposГ© of political corruption and patronage in the Philippines, and does so, crucially, with both thematic acuity and thrilling elan. The mini-series in question is Erik MattiвЂ™s On the Job: The Missing 8, a sequel to 2013вЂ™s On the Job. Which is a pity, then, because the Venice Film FestivalвЂ™s latest coup, after awarding the Golden Lion to Joker in 2019 and programming Michel FrancoвЂ™s New Order for 2020, has been to premiere in competition a mini-series due for release on HBO the very same month a coup predicated less on courting controversy than on recognizing, rightly, the artistic merits too commonly sidelined by virtue of association with вЂњcheaperвЂќ entertainment. Less is likely to be said about films that border on televisionвЂ™s realm - now christened under the sacrilegious banner of вЂњepisodic cinemaвЂќ - unless youвЂ™re David Lynch, Nicholas Winding Refn, or, for a select group of Francophiles, Bruno Dumont. Less celebrated (although this trend is, hopefully, on a cautious reversal) are films whose formal sensibilities donвЂ™t quite gel with the highbrow expectations of antiquated cinГ©astes: Lav DiazвЂ™s searing four-hour epic, The Halt, achieved limited recognition among its more conventionally aligned ilk at Cannes, but even then it still saw the light of the projection screen around the globe. And so, while a film like Lauren GreenfieldвЂ™s The Kingmaker did make headlines for its excoriating portrait of the PhilippinesвЂ™ former First Lady Imelda Marcos, it remains a stand-out for good reason. But documentary hardly exerts a monopoly over rigor and realism, for the buzz of late has been in perfectly decent but perfunctorily engaging works surfacing for their ninety minutes of lukewarm fame before sinking back into the shadows of oblivion. To make an effective political film, one frequently turns to documentary as the best medium for truth itвЂ™s hard to deny in exemplars of the genre that empirical rigor and emotional realism often prevail over shoddier, more selective depictions of subject matter.

On the job the missing 8