Citizen K

Factually comprehensive but suffers from an over-idealisation of its subject

I am not hiding and I don't plan to become a political émigré. If it's a choice of forcing me out of the country or putting me in gaol, then they'll have to put me in gaol.

• Mikhail Khodorkovsky (July 3, 2003)

As superficially entertaining a show as it was, Sons of Anarchy always had one especially egregious flaw – no matter who opposed the titular biker gang, the show went out of its way to paint them as utterly corrupt and/or amoral, and so compared to them, the bikers (who just so happen to deal illegal guns) don't seem so bad. From Ernest Darby (neo-Nazi) to Joshua Kohn (obsessed stalker) to Ethan Zobelle (white separatist) to June Stahl (murderous lesbian) to Jimmy O'Phelan (murderous Irishman) to Damon Pope (murderous black man) to Galen O'Shay (another murderous Irishman) to Lee Toric (drug-addicted sadist and reader of French poetry), the show spent far more time painting the gang as decent-by-association than actually interrogating their questionable morals. And bizarrely, Citizen K, a documentary about Russian oligarch-cum-dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has a similar problem – it's more concerned with painting Vladimir Putin as the big bad than it is with critiquing Khodorkovsky himself, who emerges as the default hero – if your villain is villainous enough, anyone who goes up against them, regardless of their own moral fibre, is going to look pretty good. Partly in service of this reading of history, although the film is undeniably informative in a factual sense, it suffers from an absence of any kind of psychological deep dive and gives Khodorkovsky more of a pass than seems appropriate.

Directed by Alex Gibney, the prolific Academy Award-winning documentarian behind films on subjects such as the collapse of Enron (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the torture and murder of Dilawar by the US Army (Taxi to the Darkside), the Catholic Church sex...

'Citizen K' makes an interesting companion piece to Herzog's 'Meeting Gorbachev', which captured the promise of 1989 and mourned what came next. Gibney's documentary is essential viewing for anyone needing a history lesson about Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, wants a frontline report on the current geopolitical landscape in Europe - including Ukraine - or just wants to know what it takes to bring down a towering political figure.

• Jake Watt

Read Jake's full article... https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-citizen-k-the-rapid-rise-and-thunderous-fall-of-a-russian-oligarch

Western propaganda from the pen of a smug self-made man who tries to mitigate his moral failings.