Oliver STONE - SNOWDEN - 2016 biographical political thriller soon in FRANCE

USPA NEWS - 'Snowden' is a 2016 biographical political thriller film directed by Oliver Stone, to be released in FRANCE on November 01, 2016. Before production began, Stone and Gordon-Levitt personally met Snowden in 2015 in Moscow, where he had been living in exile with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, since...

'Snowden' is a 2016 biographical political thriller film directed by Oliver Stone, to be released in FRANCE on November 01, 2016. Before production began, Stone and Gordon-Levitt personally met Snowden in 2015 in Moscow, where he had been living in exile with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, since evading the U.S. government's attempts to arrest him for espionage.

Directed by : Oliver Stone
Screenplay by : Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone
Produced by : Moritz Borman, Eric Kopeloff, Phillip Schulz-Deyle, Fernando Sulchin
Based on : 'The Snowden Files' by Luke Harding and 'Time of the Octopus' by Anatoly Kucherena
Starring : Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, LaKeith Lee Stanfield, Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage
Distributed by : Open Road Films
Running time : 134 minutes
Release dates : September 9, 2016 (TIFF), September 16, 2016 (United States), September 22, 2016 (Germany), November 01, 2016 (France)

STORY :

In Hong Kong of 2013, Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) meets with columnist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) at a hotel. They are met by Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in the lobby. Snowden brings the two to his room to begin documenting everything that has led up to this moment. In 2006, Snowden began training for a position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Outside of work, Snowden chats online with a girl named Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley). In 2009, Snowden begins working at Dell as a supervisor on NSA computer system upgrades.

With ties to the NSA, Edward Snowden begins to observe work that he finds disturbing, in which he realizes that the government is actively spying on people through a number of programs, including PRISM. He starts to collect the documents he uncovers in a dossier, all containing information on the NSA's surveillance practices.

OUR REVIEW :

Edward Snowden is something of a geek and technocrat, not the kind of flamboyant figure who populated many of Oliver Stone´s earlier movies. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a good job of disappearing into the guarded, self-contained character. The relationship between Lindsay Mills and Edward Snowden is the key to the film as he faces the conflicting demands of love and duty.

There are a lot of good actors in this movie, but aside from Gordon-Levitt, almost none of them has a chance to etch an indelible character. Some of them have so little to do here that we would never guess they had won awards in other films. Oliver Stones tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, circling back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy. Edward Snowden is presented as a disillusioned idealist, a serious young man whose experiences lead him to doubt accepted truths and question the wisdom of authority.

Ruby BIRD
http://www.portfolio.uspa24.com/
Yasmina BEDDOU
http://www.yasmina-beddou.uspa24.com/