Popular reviews

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★ 3

  I wonder if there's a guy at NSA SIGINT who has to sift through Letterboxd reviews.

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  Review by josh lewis ★★ 1

  bleh. was likely destined to live in the shadow of poitras' sublime portrait of how an ordinary citizen, including this particularly mundane, unpretentious one, has the power to shake a nation (Citizenfour) on principle, but did stone have to lean into it so hard? in trying to fit snowden into a traditional Great Man™ biopic, he contradicts the fundamental truths uncovered in that doc, not to mention the very man himself... snowden is indeed a patriot, but he's a patriot because he was just normal dude doing what he felt was right, not because he's a super secret hacker spy genius who had nic cage tell him to distrust the US government.

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  Review by Wesley R. Ball ★★★

  Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither. -Benjamin Franklin

  George Orwell's 1984 is one of the greatest novels I've ever read. It showed tremendous insight and forewarning into a future that was closer than people could have imagined at the time. As we get further and further into the digital age, the ideas and themes prevalent in that novel are becoming more and more realistic, and what was previously conceived as fiction is becoming alarmingly factual. Edward Snowden's massive leak of NSA documents and their surveillance activities shook the nation to its core, causing division and a serious change in the perception of how private and free the American life really is.

  Edward Snowden is a hero, but the…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★½ 1

  This is not a very exciting film; at times, it's downright boring. It feels weirdly sedate for something by Oliver Stone, particularly since Edward Snowden's story touches on so many of his favorite themes: Abuse of government power, paranoia, conspiracies, and young idealists learning brutal lessons about the world. Stone's channeled all of these ideas into some of the most aggressive and intense Hollywood movies of our times. Snowden has very little of that anger. For a movie about our free country's slide into a surveillance state, it's awfully chill. Even Peter Gabriel's plot song, "The Veil," is mellow. Where is the urgency? JFK, a 25 year old movie, feels modern in comparison, particularly in terms of editing and voiceover. 

  Despite…

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  Review by Ashton ★★

  when it cuts to the real edward snowden at the end and it’s revealed that he doesn’t sound like a muppet? that’s camp.

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  Review by Rach ☕️📖 1

  Joe. Baby. What’re ya doing with your voice? You still cute tho.

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  Review by chavel ★★★½ 6

  Oliver Stone used to rock us out of our seats and blow our minds (“JFK,” “The Doors,” “Nixon”), but I think that incendiary fire within him is past now. Snowden is a tempered, yet always mindful piece of storytelling on one of the biggest stories of this century. Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in persuasive braniac mode) is the famous whistleblower who leaked to the world that all of our web data and online searches, the cameras on our phones and laptops, had been used by NSA and CIA to spy on us, and nine internet firms were accomplices (example: Google). The director of National Security, Keith Alexander, even lied to Congress! We as a people have naively persisted on with…

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  Review by jpark ★★★★½ 13

  As someone who falls confidently into the camp that declares Edward Snowden a hero, this film is impossible for me to review in a way that bears any semblance of objectivity. I have a sticker of his face with the word "TRUTH" on the back of the laptop I am writing this on, and I'll aggressively go to bat for him when anyone vocally criticizes his monumental contribution to our country.

  With that in mind, I loved Snowden. I won't claim this is a neutral effort, Stone clearly feels very similarly to myself. He portrays the titular character as a rational, ethical creature; his defining trait being responsibility. Accountability. Rationality. This carries into the film. Stone makes Snowden's case with…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½

  48/100

  A.V. Club review. Remember when the news broke and we all desperately wanted to know more about Snowden The Man, including his relationship with his girlfriend? Our prayers have finally been answered!

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  Review by Travis Lytle ★★★★

  Unfolding with a level-headed clarity and pulsing with impressive tension, Oliver Stone's "Snowden" is a riveting, well-built drama. A biopic and cautionary tale, the film is enough to cause it audience worry about their own technological comings and goings while offering a satisfyingly told and timely story.

  Information, manipulation, security, and the abuse of trust drive the tale of Edward Snowden, a CIA programmer who leaked classified material in attempt to expose how certain agencies trample the very freedoms they serve to protect. Stone allows the audience to glimpse bits of Snowden's character, coupling those glimpses with an observation of the US security machine at work.

  Stone presents Snowden as a hero. He is a genius revolutionary, exposing truths that…

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  Review by kyle97 ★★½

  Snowden is certainly an engaging, accessible movie about a controversial figure, but Stone’s heavy reliance on the romance of Snowden and Lindsay Mills to propel the narrative just make the whole film feel lightweight. Shailene Woodley gets a lot of screentime, but she mostly functions as a reflection of Snowden’s paranoia. Her character comes across as whiny at times.

  I’m also not a fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s voice affectations. His acting would make a good SNL performance, but in the movie it rings false. He comes across as trying too hard to imitate the real Snowden, but instead ends up sounding more like Ashton Kutcher. Like his performance in The Walk, Gordon-Levitt walks the thin line between becoming the fully realized character and giving a performance that feels like a caricature. And again he falls into the latter.

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  Review by ejay ★★★

  A flashy dramatisation of a whistleblower's mind-blowing revelations and, apparently, his private life.

  While the government demonised Edward Snowden for his actions, this movie rather humanised him. Gordon-Levitt portrays him and he does it competently, with Woodley whose depiction of Lindsay Mills is decent. Generally, it accomplishes what it sets out to do by settling for didactic storytelling and spicing things up with mostly suspenseful moments. There's no denying that Snowden (2016) covered the events very well, but the patchy rhythm of its narrative and overwrought script can be a restraint.