Like him or loathe him, RISK is an engaging little documentary following the tribulations of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange during the most tumultuous moments of his life. The film provides a first-hand account of what it's like to be caught up in an international hacking scandal with far-reaching consequences for those involved. Anyone interested in the modern world and in particular politics, security, and the Internet can't fail to be entranced by this material, and I think the most interesting part of it is that Assange himself isn't a sympathetic figure at all, although the documentary is very good.

The ability of whistle-blowers to leak sensitive, and even secret, information is an essential check on the potential abuse of power by government. But Julain Assange, founder of Wikileaks, a website established to assist such whistle-blowers, is a deeply problematic figure: an egoist who falls out with his own collaborators with amazing frequency; a man who seemed hardly to take accusations of rape seriously; an instinctive anarchist who sometimes seems to be fighting not government tyranny everywhere, but exclusively in America. This documentary was conceived as a friendly venture (in fact, the film-maker quietly reveals she is not exactly a neutral party in the story), but the essential vanity of Assange is clearly on display. Ultimately, it's hard to avoid concluding that whatever good Wikileaks might have done has been fatally compromised by the man at its core.

While my political perspective is much different from Laura Poitras, the director, I was able to appreciate "Citizenfour" and could see why it received such acclaim.

Not so with this one. Just a sloppy, haphazard effort. Supposedly this was filmed over a 6 year period, but it would have been nice if there were some markers along the way telling us which year that which things were happening. If it's difficult to judge the years now, imagine 10- 20 years from now, when this is less of a "hot topic" issue.

Although Poitras is clearly on the side of what Wikileaks does, she still makes Assange come off as a real sexist jerk. And his #1 assistant, Sarah Harrison, comes off as a Stepford Wife that has apparently drunk gallons and gallons of Kool-Aid.

Obviously, it is hard to ignore the politics of a film like this when reviewing it. If you agree with the politics, you'll probably be more supportive of this film. If you don't agree with what Wikileaks is doing, you'll view Assange and company as smug, self-important hypocrites.

After I saw the film, I was reading up about how this film was re-cut after being shown at Cannes, where Poitras had a change of heart on how she had previously shown Assange, and decided to now show his more sexist side. Similar to the change in perspective of Jacob Applebaum, whom Poitras was apparently sleeping with during a portion of this six year period, and then he was later accused of sexual misconduct. A film about all of that would probably have been a more interesting story than what we saw in the film.