Citizenfour

Imagine if a documentary filmmaker followed Woodward and Bernstein when they went to visit Deep Throat. At moments in "Citizenfour," you may feel like a similar experience is taking place.

The setup is familiar. You've seen it before in espionage thrillers from Hitchcock to Dan Brown: A journalist is contacted by an anonymous source with big news, but this information can expose shocking secrets about the establishment. In this case there are two journalists, a reporter and a documentary filmmaker, and this Academy Award-winning documentary is a pretty straight forward recording of a whistleblower blowing.

A man who goes by the pseudonym of Citizenfour, but whom we all instantly recognize as Edward Snowden, informs the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Glenn Greenwald that as of 2011 the US Government has been recording millions of innocent people. They have 20 sites monitoring one billion telephone or internet sessions simultaneously, collecting our conversations and tracking our behavioral patterns at a terabit per second.

"This is not science fiction," says Snowden. "This stuff is happening right now... Every border you cross, every purchase you make, call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, site you visit, subject line you type and packet you route is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not."

What makes this documentary monumental is not its filmmaking, but rather that it simply captures a specific moment in history. We all know the repercussions of this event, but now we get to see it.

Included in this Blu-ray are wonderful special features: deleted scenes; a "New York Times" Talk about the film with the director Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and David Carr; a Q&A with Poitras and Dennis Lim and "The Program" a short documentary about government monitoring by the feature's director.

"Citizenfour"
Blu-ray
$12.98
citizenfourfilm.com