If Laura Poitras’s documentary about Julian Assange, “Risk,” does anything, it shows how blasรฉ it can look to disrupt the world these days. A portrait in catered seclusion as both legal necessity and performance, it will neither turn the WikiLeaks founder’s fans into doubters, nor his doubters into fans.
(He may not shed righteous tears for the fight against tyranny, but it’s not as if he’s got a cat on his lap, cackling like 007’s nemesis Blofeld, either.)
But it does seem as if the Academy Award-winning director of “CitizenFour” — given unprecedented access to filming Assange as his reputationย went from idealistically minded to questionably craven — became a teensy bit of an ex-devotee over the course of shooting and editing “Risk,” even if her own commitment to exposing the realities of the security state hasn’t wavered.