Laura Poitras – Memphis Flyer

The big release in movie theaters this week is the latest Marvel contraption, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Reluctant Avenger Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who usually gets just kinda small, gets super-tiny. We’re talking seething quantum foam of semi-imaginary particles small. His variably sized partner Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and their daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who also sports a super-small suit, also get tiny, along with legendary super-scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). There they meet Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who will apparently be important in the next hundred or so Marvel movies.

If you’re not into getting quantum-realm small, how about a small indie romance from Australia? Of An Age is writer/director Goran Stolevski’s second feature film. Ebony (Hattie Hook) is a late-teen party girl whose bestie Kol (Elias Anton) is also her ballroom dance partner. When Kol has to pull Ebony out of a bad situation, he enlists her brother Adam (Thom Green) as a driver, and sparks fly.

But maybe you’re looking for a different kind of small. Short films are often the highlight of film festivals, but rarely get screen time in commercial theaters. There’s a great opportunity to watch the Oscar-nominated short films in the animation, documentary, and narrative categories at the Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill this week. These films won awards at qualifying festivals, and now the up-and-coming filmmakers have a chance at Oscar glory. And who knows, maybe one of them will get slapped by Will Smith!

Speaking of Oscar contenders, on Wednesday, Feb. 22, Indie Memphis brings the nominated documentary All the Beauty And the Bloodshed to Studio on the Square. Directed by CitizenFour helmer Laura Poitras, it tells the story of legendary photographer Nan Goldin and her crusade against the Sackler family, pharmaceutical oligarchs who also happen to be big patrons of the arts. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed became only the second documentary in history to win the Golden Lion at Cannes, and it’s probably the frontrunner for the Oscar, too.

I truly believe that meaningful personal liberty is impossible without guaranteed personal privacy. Which is why Citizenfour — Laura Poitras’ new documentary about Edward Snowden’s decision to expose the United States government’s massive, secret, and mostly illegal foreign and domestic surveillance programs — is the most frightening movie I’ve seen in years. Watching Citizenfour is like slowly ingesting a long draught of liquid hopelessness; the enormity of the dull, aching fear it produces is akin to being reminded repeatedly about both your political impotence and your cosmic insignificance.

Interestingly, Snowden — whose long interview in a Hong Kong hotel room with Poitras and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill makes up nearly half the film — reached out to the filmmaker via email while she was living in Berlin and working on a documentary about the contemporary surveillance state. Snowden’s earliest correspondence appears onscreen as a nonsensical jumble of letters and numbers that suggest the Zodiac killer’s initial letters to the Bay Area press. But we quickly realize that these are copies of the heavily encrypted messages Snowden originally sent.

Poitras reads excerpts from these emails throughout the film, and at first they sound like dispatches from the outer provinces of a conspiracy-mad no-man’s-land. For example, when it comes to password protection, Poitras is told to “assume your adversary is capable of 1 trillion guesses per second.” As the film goes on, and as the government’s capacity and willingness to spy on its own citizens grows clearer, they start to sound like the grim facts of online life.

Edward Snowden

Poitras and her collaborators make the mountains of information Snowden presents to them fairly easy to see and understand. She doesn’t deal explicitly with many of the documents Snowden leaked, but over time the sinister implications of buzzwords like “meta-data” and “linkability” become apparent. It is sobering to know that, if you have a debit card and a phone, the government can essentially track your whereabouts at all times. (It’s also sobering to know that someone somewhere has recorded every instance where I searched for more information about “GCHQ” or “Wikileaks” or “Jacob Appelbaum” while writing this review.)

Snowden himself is capable of a grim sense of humor about his endeavors, but mostly he exudes the divine gravity of a tech-savvy monk who’s doused himself in gasoline and is about to light a match. He keeps his identity secret for as long as he can, but when he speaks, his words feel aimed at future generations. He’s onscreen a lot in this movie, and one of the film’s biggest shocks is that this harmless-looking dweeb, with his patchy facial hair and strong prescription lenses is the one who spoke out.

The end of the film, which features Snowden and Greenwald in matching blue shirts exchanging slips of paper and knowing glances like a pair of overgrown private-school kids, is silent about next steps. But what is to be done? And if not now, when?