over-directed

Yes, and also just really dull. Everyone's written so paper-thin.

How does one tell when a film is overdirected? I'm slightly confused.

one watches the film

wise words

You're a bit of brown-nosing halfwit, jmovies, and I highly respect you for it.

Creating a film focused on events of the recent past, on decisions made and moments inspired by people whose lives are still in motion and unresolved, is challenging, and it is a course The Fifth Estate at times fails to navigate with grace, but I still found the overall film to be an engaging, thoughtful, and worthy experience. It is, of course, the story of Julian Assange, the iconic and divisive Australian web activist who founded a website to post the secret (and oftentimes damning) documents of financial institutions and governments without redaction and to protect the brave people who spirit them from inside the vaults of the powerful to the public at large. The film focuses on the briefly felicitous, later troubled bond shared by Julian and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German computer expert and early advocate of the Internet as a vehicle with which to pursue justice and truth. With the distinctive white hair and a gaze always turning from anxious and alive to cold and calculating, rising British star Benedict Cumberbatch is entrusted with one of the year's flashier roles and, to his credit, perfectly captures the blend of magnetic, if unusual charm and otherworldly menace which defines the iconoclastic man whose face has so often dominated evening newscasts in recent years.

Most of the swiftly paced and suspense oriented film's stylistic and thematic choices are sound, including one to visualize the Internet as a heightened physical environment in which the characters interact to sidestep the potential for a tedious visual experience (since typing is not the most cinematic of actions), though certain lines of dialogue land with a thud, sounding closer to thesis statements from a university paper on morality, privacy, and technology in the 21st century than a natural conversation. In spite of its earnest imperfections and, if this is indeed a flaw, its predictable failure to wrap its hands around the complexity and legacy of its subject in his entirety, The Fifth Estate is not a hard film to recommend for three reasons: its lead performance is marvelous, it moves at an entertaining and urgent spy-movie pace, and it has the potential to inspire valuable conversation and further investigation.

B+

Is Anthony Mackie meant to be playing the Deputy Director of the NSA? If so, perfectly cast.