We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks Reviews
Top CriticThis thorough, engrossing film shows how idealistic Aussie hacker Julian Assange took on the might of the US, exposing their military and diplomatic misconduct, then allowed his own murky personal life to tarnish his credibility.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Sometimes it takes a feature-length documentary to stitch together a story we think we already know.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A real-life cyber-thriller with real-life consequences, Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is a riveting and revelatory documentary ...
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Gibney builds a remarkable level of suspense, given how exhaustively WikiLeaks has been covered in the media.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
At once an awkward mingling of two complex life stories and a gripping, necessary look at how information is gathered, shared and, yes, stolen.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Who is "We" in the title We Steal Secrets? There's no need for a spoiler alert, but it's neither Gibney nor Assange.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Despite its wonky-Washington theme, We Steal Secrets ends up being a surprisingly soulful and, yes, even moving story of hubris, good intentions and mistakes.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The sequence in which Manning confides in former hacker Adrian Lamo and gets turned in to the FBI supplies the kind of human drama that has made Gibney's work so engrossing in the past.
The movie's especially deft at exposing spin, whether it's the US media's or Assange's.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The results are far more exciting than most Hollywood espionage thrillers.
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| Original Score: A-
Alex Gibney's latest, "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks," is very good -- manage to do both.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Unlike many other non-fiction filmmakers, Gibney is not interested in scoring easy points. He has a point of view, but he also wants to be fair.
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| Original Score: 3/4
How do you make this a motion picture? Some might call it sleight-of-hand, but it's something Mr. Gibney has proved himself adept at time and time again ...
A sprawling, ambitious, major work -- a gripping exploration of power, personality, technology and the crushing weight that can come to bear on those who find themselves in its combined path.
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| Original Score: 4/5
For all its faults, "We Steal Secrets" reminds us that despite the potential of WikiLeaks, its project of truth and consequences remains treacherous and complicated in practice.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Even the movie's title, or rather the source of it, is a surprise.
Future historians will find the ideal chronicle of our era in the superbly crafted "We Steal Secrets."
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| Original Score: 5/5
Despite Gibney's best efforts to put a halo on Manning, the enormity of what the soldier did towers over what has been done to him.
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| Original Score: 3/4
You'll leave knowing slightly more about the who, what and why of WikiLeaks; you'll also wish the whole shebang didn't fell like such a tone-deaf data dump overall.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Gibney, a prolific and skilled documentarian, marshals and organizes a raft of information as deftly as anyone could wish. But his conclusions are murkier than they might be.
Much of the material is out there, but Gibney has a talent for creating a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to experience the full scope of this ugly, scary story.
After a long run of Bush-critical pics, it's heartening to see Gibney shift his target to the current administration, demonstrating an ongoing willingness to take on the Man, whoever that may be.
Alex Gibney's docu-portrait of WikiLeaks is both a juicy chronicle of recent history and a provocative reflection on the role of secrecy in an instant-access world.
