Alex Gibney

While the eventful life of Fela Kuti provides more than enough subject matter for a biographical documentary, award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney weakens the film with a second narrative strand that feels like another movie altogether. He did the same thing with last year's The Armstrong Lie, which compromised the Lance Armstrong scandal with clips from an abandoned glowing doc about his earlier comeback. This time, he has intercut Fela's story with a theatre group trying to mount a show about his life.

Born in 1938, Fela is considered one of the most important figures in 20th century Africa. As a pioneering composer and performer, he transformed Nigeria's musical landscape, all while standing up for human rights and criticising political corruption, often at considerable risk of retaliation from Nigeria's oppressive government. As a young man, he was influenced by jazz clubs he visited in London and Los Angeles, and returned to Lagos to start his own iconic venue, The Shrine. A lone voice against government corruption, he lived a communal life with countless wives, girlfriends and children, and he very nearly sabotaged his career with heavy drug use. But even with his death in 1997 at age 58, he challenged the Nigerian state propaganda machine, which had declared that Aids did not exist in the country.

This story is told with a superb wealth of archival footage, stills and interviews, letting Fela himself speak and sing as his life traverses the first 50 years of Nigerian independence. This is such a vitally important story of a seriously revolutionary man that it's utterly gripping. So it's rather frustrating that Gibney weaves it together with the project to tell Fela's story through a Broadway musical. The practice and performance clips offer dramatic recreations of events in Fela's life, putting his music in context, but the actual home movies and newsreel clips tell us a lot more.

Continue reading: Finding Fela Review

This biographical documentary about disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong feels eerily gentle compared to filmmaker Alex Gibney's recent films, the WikiLeaks doc We Steal Secrets and the Catholic priest expose Mea Maxima Culpa. But then it was originally conceived as a celebration of Armstrong's comeback at the 2009 Tour de France, which is still at the heart of the film.

It was during this comeback that Armstrong's stellar image started to slip, with old rivalries and gurgling rumours surging to the surface. Gibney intercuts interviews he shot at the time with more recent chats, including a conversation immediately after Armstrong taped his notorious confessional interview with Oprah Winfrey. So we vividly see Armstrong's two-faced personality. Along the way, Gibney also traces the cyclist's remarkable rise to fame, his near death from cancer and the secret doping system he used to win the Tour de France seven times from 1999 to 2005. Armstrong's rationale is that everyone else was doing the same thing, so it was actually a level playing field.

Only of course it wasn't, because many cyclists remained clean and were edged out of the winning position as a result. Gibney also talks to a wide variety of experts, journalists and fellow riders who discuss the sport's culture of omerta (a mafia-style code of honour). From the news reports, we already know about the many years of deception, which is why society no longer holds professional athletes to such high, clean standards. It's clearly more about the money now than the human achievement. And there's so much cash to be made that competitors will break every rule there is if they think they'll get away with it.

Continue reading: The Armstrong Lie Review

With a subject matter that oddly feels both timely and out-of-date, this documentary is packed with telling details about WikiLeaks, Although it gets muddy as it delves into the lives of founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Bradley Manning. Prolific Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (see Taxi to the Dark Side or Maxima Mea Culpa) deploys his usual skill to assemble a lucid, entertaining film, but the dirt-digging approach leaves us with more questions than answers.

The roots of WikiLeaks go back to the pre-internet days in 1989, when Melbourne student Assange participated with a group of hackers to break into Nasa's space shuttle launch system with a message from Australian band Midnight Oil: "You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war". Nearly 20 years later he established WikiLeaks in the response the growing mountain of secrets being held by Western governments following 9/11. The idea is simple: WikiLeaks allows people to post images and documents anonymously in a way that can never be taken down. And it's essentially run by one man with a battered laptop and lots of friends.

The film features a wide array of interviews with people who have worked with Assange or know his work, plus extensive footage of the man himself. The most telling description of him is as a "humanitarian anarchist" who speaks out against what he sees as "not democracy but encroaching privatised censorship". And the main focus here is on his interaction with Manning, a military computer nerd who was picked on for being gay, stuck in an isolated Iraqi base and shocked by evidence he discovered about the American military's illegal, unethical and immoral activities.

Continue reading: We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks Review