With his gripping new docudrama Snowden, which just had its world premiere at TIFF, Stone is totally on the side of Edward Snowden , painting the fugitive ex-CIA and National Security Agency whistleblower as an American patriot, not the evil “hacker” that U.S. President Obama dismissed Snowden as when it all blew open in 2013. Yet Stone does so with a good measure of restraint, a quality rare for him. Snowden would make a great double bill with Citizenfour, the Oscar-winning 2014 doc by Laura Poitras, which featured the real Edward Snowden as he prepared to reveal his identity to the world. Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden is more like Alan Turing, the brilliant but socially inept Second World War computer pioneer portrayed in The Imitation Game. There’s a scene in Snowden where new CIA recruit Edward is shown the agency’s vintage spyware by a cynical old hand played by Nicolas Cage.

Source: thestar September 15, 2016 18:11 UTC