Alex Gibney
Occupation
Actor
John Travolta Doesn't Care To See Alex Gibney's Scientology Documentary
By Michael West in Movies / TV / Theatre on 08 April 2015
John Travolta has defended his controversial church and says he hasn't seen Alex Gibney's controversial documentary.
John Travolta has come out in defence of his controversial religion Scientology after the release of Alex Gibney's documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which depicts the church as dangerous.
Travolta, who converted to Scientology in 1975, told the Tampa Bay Times that he hasn't watched the film and that he doesn't "really care" to see it.
Continue reading: John Travolta Doesn't Care To See Alex Gibney's Scientology Documentary
Frank Sinatra HBO Documentary 'All Or Nothing' Celebrates Iconic Singer's 100th Birthday
By Stephanie Chase in Music / Festivals on 06 April 2015
Directed by ‘Going Clear’s’ Alex Gibney, ‘All Or Nothing’ is a sympathetic look at Sinatra’s life through his music.
As one of the most recognisable voices of the 20th century, much has been written about the colourful life of Frank Sinatra in the years since his death in 1998. But this Sunday night (April 5th ) on HBO, Alex Gibney’s latest documentary All Or Nothing will attempt to provide the most in-depth look yet at both the singer’s career and personal life.
The songs he chose tell the story of his life. #Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, April 5 and 6: http://t.co/Cz6aMiiYdu pic.twitter.com/zIu6sDNGj3
— HBO (@HBO) March 24, 2015
Continue reading: Frank Sinatra HBO Documentary 'All Or Nothing' Celebrates Iconic Singer's 100th Birthday
Sundance: Gibney's Scientology Doc 'Going Clear' Has Tom Cruise Claims
By Michael West in Movies / TV / Theatre on 26 January 2015
Alex Gibney is back with his latest documentary - this time tackling scientology.
Alex Gibney's Scientology documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief rocked audiences on the third day of the Sundance Film Festival, with various revelations coming to light from former followers of the religion. The movie had apparently been vetted by 160 lawyers before its premiere.
The film details numerous allegations, including revelations about Tom Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman. Based on a nonfiction bestseller by Lawrence Wright, Gibney's film reveals that Kidman was viewed by Scientology head honchos as a "Potential Trouble Source" and an enemy to any Scientologist. That status mainly arose from the fact that she was raised by a father who was a psychologist - a profession the church despises.
Continue reading: Sundance: Gibney's Scientology Doc 'Going Clear' Has Tom Cruise Claims
Finding Fela Review
By Rich Cline
Good
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
The Armstrong Lie Review
By Rich Cline
Very Good
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
The Armstrong Lie Trailer
Lance Armstrong was probably one of the most inspirational sportsmen on the planet with seven Tour De France triumphs and an Olympic medal behind him; he even overcame a severe bout of cancer in 1996 and developed popular charity, the Livestrong Foundation. However, in 2013 he found himself stripped of all his prestigious titles and relieved of his cycling career after the US Anti-Doping Agency found solid proof that he had been taking performance enhancing drugs - a claim he admitted had been happening for a large part of his career. Filmmaker Alex Gibney had set out to work on a movie based on his return to cycling in 2008 following a three year retirement, but the project turned on its head when it was revealed Armstrong had been lying to him for two years, denying all doping claims.
Oscar winner Alex Gibney ('Taxi to the Dark Side', 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room', 'We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks') directs this extraordinary documentary detailing Lance Armstrong's immense fall from grace. The film was originally to be called 'The Road Back', but a major name change was needed when the project took a dramatic turn. 'The Armstrong Lie' will hit the US on November 8th 2013.
Click Here To Read - The Armstrong Lie Movie Review
We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks Review
By Rich Cline
Very Good
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
Without Assange's Blessing, 'WikiLeaks: We Steal Secrets' Rolls Out In Theaters
By Michael West in Movies / TV / Theatre on 24 May 2013
Alex Gibney's critically acclaimed documentary hits theaters on a limited run.
Acclaimed documentarian Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) has returned with no-holds-bared look at WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website run by enigmatic Australian internet activist Julian Assange. The site's mandate involved publishing top-secret documents and covert information, sending security services into wild panic and making Assange a rock-star of 21st century media.
Assange nor WikiLeaks have been involved with the movie, which directs most of its focus on Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst who admitted to leaking hundreds of thousands of secret military logs to WikiLeaks and who faces possible life imprisonment in a military trial. Late on Thursday (May 23, 2013) - ahead of the movie's limited release in theater - WikiLeaks said We Steal Secrets "portrays Manning's alleged acts as a failure of character rather than a triumph of conscience," and said the film's portrayal of his relationship with Assange was "grossly irresponsible".
Watch the WikiLeaks: We Steal Secrets Trailer!
Continue reading: Without Assange's Blessing, 'WikiLeaks: We Steal Secrets' Rolls Out In Theaters
'We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks' Shows The Real Julian Assange? (Trailer)
By Michael West in Movies / TV / Theatre on 04 April 2013
'We Steal Secrets' has received strong reviews for its exhaustively rehearsed look at the rise of Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, 'We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks' tells the story of the real intentions of the whistleblowing website and the various moral issues surrounding it. However, it focuses on the rock-star rise to fame of its founder, Julian Assange, who was hailed as a revolutionary before holing up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London over fears he would be extradited to the US to face charges of the release of classified American diplomatic cables.
Described as a no holds barred look at the rise of Wikileaks, 'We Steal Secrets' not only gets inside the inner mind of the Assange and his website, it penetrates a complex network of activity which, on one hand, may be guided by courage and idealism, though is also guilty of hypocrisy. In the new trailer, we see Assange getting shirty with an intrepid journalist, and pruning over his front-page spread in The Guardian newspaper.
Continue reading: 'We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks' Shows The Real Julian Assange? (Trailer)
We Steal Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks Trailer
This tell-all documentary about the inception of top secret information leaking site Wikileaks.org and its subsequent release of damaging government files ties together all the events from the last few years, from the arrest of Army Intelligence Officer Bradley Manning after he leaked the famous 'Collateral Murder' video where two Iraqi journalists were killed by US military forces, to founder Julian Assange's arrest over an alleged sexual assault on two Swedish women; an incident widely believed by many Wikileaks supporters to have been a 'honey trap' in order to have Assange arrested once and for all for his involvement in the leaking of government files. While Assange remains in London's Ecuadorian Embassy under diplomatic asylum, this harrowing documentary is released to question just how much right the public have to access secret information and just where the lack of privacy in this sense will end.