‘Citizenfour’ Is Both Essential Journalism and a Gripping Profile of Lived Truth

Citizenfour begins in the dark, alone. Laura Poitras reads her first missive from Edward Snowden aloud over the image of a car driving through a tunnel, all wrapped in shadow save for two red taillights and a line of yellow lights above. The scene soon switches to that of a computer screen, encountering and then decoding the encrypted email. It captures…