Open RoadSnowden is Oliver Stone’s best movie in years (years that have included such trifling films as Savages and my-favorite-dictator docs on Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez). Snowden is a bit like JFK, Stone’s gripping 1991 fever dream about the Kennedy assassination; unlike that movie, however, this one isn’t, you know, completely nuts.

Where JFK was a riot of paranoid speculation, Snowden is rooted in well-known facts about Edward Snowden, the CIA/NSA cyberwar specialist who downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified government files and turned them over to a British newspaper, The Guardian, for worldwide dissemination. The revelations in this bombshell lode of secret data, detailing the massive harvesting of civilian telephone and Internet records by both U.S. and British intelligence, shocked even the most cynical citizens, and prompted sudden reforms (or so we’re told), writes Kurt Loder.

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