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| Snowden with Glenn Greenwald, who leaked the whistleblower's information (/Variety) |
Horrifying
and gripping, Laura Poitras’ long-anticipated documentary Citizenfour doesn’t disappoint. Chronicling NSA contractor Edward
Snowden’s rise from government employee to infamous whistleblower, Poitras’
lens is intensely personal and surprisingly hands-off. She resists the
temptation to artificially ratchet up the suspense; rather, this works
perfectly as a character study. The choice to keep the camera on Snowden as he
begins releasing information, contemplating his future and his family’s,
exemplifies the power of the ordinary Poitras so frequently mines. Cumulatively,
Citizenfour is riveting because of the
sheer magnitude of what Snowden’s does; Poitras conveys a chilling
expression of the shaky ground on which the citizenry stands in relation to the
State, simply by filming Snowden describe, in great technical detail, the
unnerving role of the surveillance state in 2014. As innovative and challenging
as last year’s The Act of Killing or Stories We Tell may have been, Citizenfour extracts just as much power by
telling a story the old-fashioned way. A-