Upon a few months' reflection, I feel Kevin MacDonald's State of Play was unfairly ignored for more than the reasons brought up during its run in theaters. Play was adapted from a masterful UK miniseries, that much has been reported to death. The people I'm bothered by are those critics who rushed to watch that series so they could act hipper-than-thou and assert some sort of authoritative, lazy "not as good as the original" critique.
Those people set the critical paradigm on the movie, and by and large they suffer from what the movie is really getting at, which is the nature of authenticity and integrity. State of Play the movie is not about the exact same things as the miniseries, and that was ignored by critics who were more interested in looking cool and smart rather than giving an honest assessment of the movie. I still haven't watched the BBC One miniseries. I know, I know, I'm tragically uncool and some would say uninformed. Calm down and get off my lawn. If walking into a movie completely fresh is a bad thing all of a sudden, then I quit. I tire of reviews that only concern themselves with comparative "version A vs. version B" instead of individual evaluation. There's no such thing as complete critical objectivity, but most reviews have just thrown objectivity out the window.
Play's 85% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes doesn't cover all the critics out there, just the ones tabulated on that site. The "Eloi" movement Jeff keeps referencing includes homegrown "dude" critics among one's circle of friends who rely on the same template reviews as lazy professional critics. "It's too long," "It's not as good as the original," and "I liked the director's other movie better" are all too common among their analyses. This movie has contextually, for me, become a story about the loss of ideals and any sense of professional morality.
Extras on the Blu-ray include two Deleted Scenes [3:39], both of which were wisely excised, because the final product works better not showing what's in those two scenes. The Making of State of Play [18:45] highlighted one thing, in particular, that I'm sure I felt but didn't notice. They shots scenes with the Congressman in HD and others on film, further mixing the analog vs. digital dynamic at play.