The Fifth Estate (2013)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Julian Assange	Benedict Cumberbatch
Daniel Domscheit-Berg	Daniel Brühl
Sam Coulson	Anthony Mackie
Nick Davies	David Thewlis	½
Marcus	Moritz Bleibtreu
Anke Domscheit-Berg	Alicia Vikander
James Boswell	Stanley Tucci
Sarah Shaw	Laura Linney
Dr. Tarek Haliseh	Alexander Siddig

Review

Much like The Social Network, this film about WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange shows its protagonist as a misanthropic and destructive enigma running a tight ship. Like Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed in the aforementioned film, Assange doesn't seem to have any charisma or spark, apart from his own bitterness. This is an obvious pitfall for a film made on the basis of a manuscript written by one embittered (or at least heavily critical) ex-accomplice, in this case Daniel Domscheit-Berg. The result is a film full of bias, technicalities and conversations between two persons – Berg and Assange – but really not much else. We never come close to understanding Assange and getting under his skin, arguably because Berg never did. And because of the lacking material, director Bill Condon constructs his film as a mystery thriller full of paranoia and tension which is not accounted for dramatically. Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as Assange is fine on a superficial level, but lacks depth and humour.