The Six Billion Dollar Man – Julian Assange and the Price of Truth (15)
Directed by Eugene Jarecki 
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆

“KEEP up the fight,” Julian Assange tells a press conference at the close of Eugene Jarecki’s penetrating and comprehensive documentary. 

Jarecki conducts an unflinching assessment of Assange’s leadership of WikiLeaks — we are privy to flashes of arrogance, callousness and self-importance as well as his laudable empathy for the powerless and opposition to political deception — but its real concern is the systematic erosion of our ability to express the truth. 

The narrative, which covers 14 years, is packed with news footage, previously unseen private video, surveillance material and a plethora of interviews. Coherence is maintained by a robust chronological structure in which information is revealed piecemeal, in the style of a political thriller. 

Beginning with WikiLeaks’ distribution of the notorious Collateral Murder video, showing US forces killing journalists and civilians in Iraq, we move on to the creation of an international news partnership for the release of unredacted US diplomatic messages.  

Jarecki explains the extent to which Assange’s work antagonised a series of powerful Americans — Obama, Clinton, Biden, Pompeo, Trump — and pulls no punches in highlighting the risks this constituted to his life and health.  

The interviews are compelling: Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges are predictably incisive; Sir Alan Duncan is vindictive and insufferably smug; and disgraced WikiLeaks worker Siggi is deeply unsettling. 

An impressive meld of personal and political, Jarecki’s examination of the hounding of Assange and government manoeuvrings on censorship highlights the existential risks to investigative journalism and remind us that truth must be nurtured — it’s a fragile flower.
AH
In cinemas December 19.

Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A)
Directed by James Cameron 
⭑⭑⭑☆☆

JAMES CAMERON takes you back to the world of Pandora in this three-hour-and-15-minute-long 3D epic which will test your stamina and your bladder. 

That said, it is visually spectacular and totally immersive, while the plot is rather simplistic as the film picks up a few weeks after the end of the last one. 

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his family are struggling with the loss of his elder son Neteyam (Jamie Flatters). The RDA (Resources Development Administration) teams up with the Ash people led by Varang (Oona Chaplin) to find and capture Sully. The company is determined to take the Na’vi’s land and bring the rest of the human race there. Spider (Jack Champion), who Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) believes will bring her people’s demise, is the key. 

This is really more of the same; attempts at land grabbing by the greedy capitalist corporation resulting in genocide by the end.  

Despite being the longest Avatar film to date it does not drag. The bad news is there are two more in the works. 
MD
In cinemas December 19.

Goodbye June (15)
Directed by Kate Winslet
⭑⭑⭑⭑☆

KATE WINSLET shows she is as skilful behind the camera as she is in front of it in this heartbreaking and deeply moving family drama set just before Christmas. 

It is an impressive directorial debut feature which was written by Winslet’s son Joe Anders when he was 19 for a film screen writing course. It was inspired by the death of his grandmother when he was 13. 

When June (Helen Mirren) ends up in hospital after collapsing at home, this throws her husband (Timothy Spall) and their four adult children (Winslet, Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough and Johnny Flynn) into disarray as they contend with their volatile dynamics.  Meanwhile June decides she will die on her own terms. 

The stellar cast all bring their A-game to this beautifully observed drama, which was too close to home for me having watched my own mother die in hospital the way she wanted. 
MD
In select cinemas now and on Netflix December 24.

Super Elfkins
Directed by Ute von Münchow-Pohl
⭑⭑☆☆☆

IT would be curmudgeonly not to enjoy this highly conservative, brightly coloured, Smurf-leaning tale of a divided species of anarchist fun-lovers and their generational tensions, for all the formulaic plotting and characterisation on display. Kids’ programmes have always been a necessary distraction, the most innocent-seeming part of every regime, of every colour.

In this serving of ideological candyfloss, the evil police can be won over, and plots to help an exhausted seamstress and her lonely daughter win the day. The jolly crew of miniature helpers — the all-white elves of sentimental Germanic folklaw — have acquired a minority of dark-skinned kids, and while the elders remain frozen in a stand-off, the youngsters recognise a shared dissatisfaction.

Dumb rats are friendly, smarts cats can be tamed, daft dogs can be taught and so bourgeois family values are recycled into a slickly touristic package set, strangely, in Cologne.

A sugary confection indeed.
AR
In cinemas December 19.