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Alex Gibney has directed some of the best political documentaries of recent years including the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and, most recently, the devastating exposé of sexual predators in the Catholic church, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. In We Steal Secrets he is at his forensic best in fairly and lucidly telling the story of how the infinitely devious Julian Assange became the world's most famous whistleblower through his revelation on WikiLeaks of American state secrets, and of how one of his most significant sources, Pfc Bradley Manning, a lonely, idealistic, cross-dressing military intelligence analyst, had his identity revealed to the CIA by the young bisexual, possibly autistic hacker Adrian Lamo.

Drawing on the testimony of more than 20 witnesses (though not Assange, who fell out with everyone, Gibney included), the film creates an astonishing picture of the...

Alex Gibney's film We Steal Secrets is the first WikiLeaks documentary out of the gate – but it nearly didn't happen. The prolific film-maker talks Assange, Bradley Manning and paranoia

Had things worked out differently, Alex Gibney and Julian Assange could have been soulmates – instead, they've ended up more as enemies. Gibney is one of the most prolific documentary-makers of today, and his films often take the perspective of the victim or antihero. As such, Assange was hard to resist. "Here's this tremendously romantic figure travelling the world with a laptop in his knapsack, exposing abuses of power," says Gibney. "That sounds like a pretty good story to me."

He's not the only one: the saga of WikiLeaks, the group's part in exposing Us atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent sexual charges levelled at Assange, is one of the biggest of our era. It's a real-life, 21st-century spy...

Director: Alex Gibney; Screenwriter: Alex Gibney; Starring: Julian Assange, Adrian Lamo, Bradley Manning, James Ball, MIchael Hayden; Running time: 130 mins; Certificate: 15

Life imitating art is seldom a good thing for filmmakers. Last year, The Watch changed its name and Gangster Squad reshot entire sequences because of parallels to real-life tragedies, and more recently Jim Carrey withdrew his support for Kick-Ass 2, citing parallels to the Sandy Hook shooting. But in this case, real life has bolstered art: the actions and subsequent persecution of Prism whistleblower Edward Snowden has served only to make Alex Gibney's astute We Steal Secrets even timelier, with its open-ended, troubling questions about the morality of truth-telling for its own sake.

As much two-pronged character study as journalistic document, We Steal Secrets charts the rise and fall of WikiLeaks founder and 'face' Julian Assange, alongside the smaller and sadder story of former Us solider Bradley Manning,...

There’s nothing more terrifying than real life. No matter how scary a horror film is, seeing real stories that shouldn’t ever play out as they do is so much worse, and Alex Gibney’s documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks is nothing, if not absolutely, horrifying. Gibney’s documentary spans from the beginnings of Julian Assange’s anarchic hacking days all the way to him living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, while also focusing on the Bradley Manning case of leaking classified documents for the good of the people, and the ramifications that whistle-blowing can have.

Oddly constructed, the documentary likes to jump around and prey on human emotion to connect to the events that occurred, like a devious narrative with a huge twist at the end. Assange is played up to be some modern genius and leader of men very early on, and whilst this is picked at throughout,...

July 5, 2013

Now You See Me

Director: Louis Leterrier

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher

Running time: 115 mins

Certificate: 12A

The Bling Ring

Director: Sofia Coppola

Starring: Emma Watson, Taissa Farmiga

Running time: 90 mins

Certificate: 15

Chasing Mavericks

Director: Michael Apted, Curtis Hanson

Starring: Gerard Butler, Jonny Weston

Running time: 116 mins

Certificate: PG

A Field in England

Director: Ben Wheatley

Starring: Julian Barratt, Michael Smiley

Running time: 90 mins

Certificate: 15

July 12, 2013

Monsters University

Director: Dan Scanlon

Starring: Billy Crystal, John Goodman

Running time: 110 mins

Certificate: U

Pacific Rim

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Starring: Idris Elba, Charlie Day

Running time: 131 mins

Certificate: 12A

Trap For Cinderella

Director: Iain Softley

Starring: Tuppence Middleton, Alexandra Roach

Running time: 100 mins

Certificate: 15

We Steal Secrets

Director: Alex Gibney

Starring: Julian Assange, Adrian Lamo

Running time: 130 mins

Certificate: 15

Akira (re-release)

Director: Katsuhiro Ohtomo

Starring: Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki

Running time: 119 mins

Certificate: 15

July 19, 2013

Breathe In

Director: Drake Doremus

Starring: Felicity Jones,...

Just a month before Bradley Manning finally appeared before a military judge to confess that he did indeed leak thousands of sensitive military documents, Alex Gibney’s latest docu investigation which chronicles Manning’s involvement with the whistle blowing website Wikileaks and it’s notorious figurehead Julian Assange, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I met up with the prolific documentarian in Park City following the film’s warmly received world premiere to discuss how he got involved with the project, the challenges of presenting characters through on screen text, the moral issues of leaking government documents, what it was like dealing with the ever so slippery Assange, and trying to edit down a sprawling three hour plus cut to just over two. Our conversation in both video and text form is below.

Jordan M. Smith: I guess my first question is why Wikileaks,...

Gibney Ciphers Assange’s Brain Child

Back up a few years and you probably never had heard the name Julian Assange or his tiny little whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks, but by 2010 both the name an infamous site were page one neww. Acclaimed documentarian Alex Gibney, like many others, was taken with Assange’s bold vision to leak government and corporate secrets to the internet where they would be forever in the hands of the people, permanently available to anyone who wants them. With We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, Gibney profiles Assange and his startup with signature diligence, and in doing so he digs deep into the political perplexity that is the internet, and the story of the true purveyor of the Afghan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and the Diplomatic cables, and Us Army intelligence analyst Private Manning.

Beginning nowhere near where you’d expect, we are first...

Alex Gibney's documentary is a thoughtful look at the WikiLeaks saga but reveals little about its central mystery: Julian Assange

You'd think you'd learn a lot about Julian Assange from We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. Allow me to disavow you of that notion. The latest documentary to roll out of the Alex Gibney factory looks at the life and times of the crusading website and explores related themes such as freedom of information and the moral responsibility of activism, but is far less illuminating about its silver-haired standard-bearer.

It's probably too soon for a meaningful perspective on the WikiLeaks saga. Nonetheless Gibney ploughs ahead and adopts a conventional architecture – outlining facts that will be familiar to anyone who has kept up with the news. He sprinkles a liberal dose of talking heads over the brisk exposition, punctuated by dynamic digital renderings of cyber-chat and the flow of information.

From a computer virus named for a stripper to swarming botnet attacks on the Pentagon and Microsoft, The Daily Beast lists the 10 most infamous hacks, worms, and DDoS takedowns in the last 25 years.

The unending cyber assault executed last week by a group of anonymous "hacktivists" instilled fear and loathing in the hearts of network administrators at some of the world's most powerful governments and corporations. It was unprecedented in its scope-attracting thousands of amateur users willing to do battle in the name of free speech on the web.

Related story on The Daily Beast: The Bogus Assange Rape Case

But amongst the real hackers out there is a feeling of indifference. These "script kiddies" -as those using software to attack Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal are being called-weren't the cyber warriors the media set them out to be, but amateur, talentless teens launching assaults with the click of a mouse.

This morning on Good Morning America, George Stephanopoulos spoke with Adrian Lamo, the former computer hacker who was the one to turn in Pfc. Bradley Manning, the young military specialist who has been accused of leaking both information leaked on Sunday as well as the infamous "Collateral Murder" video from last April. Unsurprisingly, Lamo had some less than nice words for WikiLeaks. Also in the program, Stephanopoulos talked to Eric Schmitt from the New York Times who defended his paper's decision to publish some of the leaked material.

A 22-year-old army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was arrested in conjunction with several high-profile posting to WikiLeaks, an online database of anonymously submitted government and corporate documents, and the subject of a piece in last week’s New Yorker. According to Wired.com, “Manning came to the attention of the F.B.I. and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the WikiLeaks video leaker.” Manning is allegedly responsible for contributing video footage of an Apache helicopter opening fire on a dozen or so people—including two children—in Iraq in 2007, in addition to three other items, including “a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S.A.�diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing ‘almost criminal political back dealings.