Critics reviews

Near the end, as the existence of another whistleblower is unveiled, and as Poitras, Snowden, and Greenwald encourage the sprouting of more like him or her, Citizenfour turns into a visual manual on how to reveal state secrets, what risks and sacrifices are involved, and how to go about doing it without getting caught.

Forget for a moment that it's distributed by the Weinstein Company and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature--CITIZENFOUR is best appreciated as an essay-film. CITIZENFOUR is a DV production, of course, but Poitras' sense of media heritage reaches back to an earlier era, looking for a model that predates the inspirational, talking head docs that clutter our screens today. The effect is akin to a 16mm tract screened in an empty university basement.

Laura Poitras is a great filmmaker who makes layered, dense, powerful nonfiction cinema (for example, two of my very favourite documentaries: The Oath and My Country, My Country) and I don't have to think Citizenfour rises to her previous levels of artistry to agree with its many admirers that it's a crucial work that should be seen by all.

When the story finally does hit the media, the film takes on an even more uncanny twist: we now see Snowden watching the coverage of himself on 24-hour news channels, before absconding from the hotel under the cover of a grey hoodie. This footage is of such an indescribable tension and such a rare fortuity – comparable to a filmmaker being on hand for Gavrilo Princip's final moments before assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand – that it overwhelmingly dominates the film as a whole.

I was riveted by Citizenfour. The film succeeds both as a fascinating whistleblowing procedural and as an eerie mood-piece about the digital panopticon the world is becoming. As the third in a trilogy about post-9/11 America, Citizenfour made me think of Poitras in relation to Kathryn Bigelow: both women have created work about the impact and overstepping of American power.

From one of the funniest films to one of the most sobering, Citizenfour chronicles the historical leak of U.S. government surveillance secrets by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It's a monumental work, not just as a historical record, but as a sensitive account of the media's role in telling the story. It uncannily resembles a Hollywood thriller, raising questions of how fiction seeps into the fabric of our reality.

Like the exemplary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, [Poitras] is interested in the impact of institutions on the individuals whom they condition; but where Wiseman's films may (in passing) show the actions and suffering of a person of extraordinary interest, he seldom directs our attention for long toward the individual case... Poitras has the same double focus, but with the emphasis reversed...

The value of recording this historical political event-in-the-making is doubtless, (akin to, say, the documentation of the Eichmann trial or the text of Martin Luther's 95 Theses) but artistically it is still but potential, a text to subsequently be commented on, interpreted, re-edited, manipulated. For now, it is a string of gestures and words, like collected data which precludes understanding rather than granting it.

The intellectual questions in nonfiction of late have swirled around hybridity and exploding forms, but hopefully in the wake of CITIZENFOUR we'll be refocused on the basics of filmmaking: Poitras has crafted a real-life thriller more energetic than Kathryn Bigelow's infinitely higher budgeted Zero Dark Thirty.

The film plays like a reality cat-and-mouse spy thriller, with the trio out to expose the dragnet before it catches them. Electrifyingly, the film shows us history in the making. Has such a political actor ever before gone direct to a filmmaker in the heat of the action?

It's difficult, if not impossible, to orient your moral compass when you can barely get a reading. Poitras' movie ably captures this strangely placid sociopolitical anxiety with a clinician's touch; no surprise that Steven Soderbergh signed on as an executive producer. Yet overall I find it a patchy experience, much stronger piecemeal than on the whole.

This is the first movie I've seen since All the President's Men — in its own way, also very much about surveillance and corruption — that takes stock of a current political event as it roils and ripples out, leaving its audience with a heavy, sick feeling.