Critic Reviews

Easily the most important film anyone has released this year, it is a documentary that deserves to be seen by every sentient citizen of this country – and indeed the world.

What Zero Days lacks in subtlety and formal innovation, however, it compensates for in breadth and lucidity.

Clear, urgent and positively terrifying at times.

Gibney’s film cuts across subjects and genres with its own fluid, quicksilver intelligence.

Zero Days has a similarly balanced outlook along with a critical political viewpoint that avoids hysteria and demagogy. Its strongest protest is against what Mr. Gibney sees as the dangers of excessive American secrecy.

Anything but dull, Gibney’s clarion call whipsaws along like a combo Jason Bourne/007 thriller minus all that running. Unnerving and likely to give viewers some bitter food for thought, Zero Days is Gibney’s most important work yet.

It’s a detective story. It’s a spy thriller. It’s a cautionary tale. And it’s true.

His new film Zero Days may ostensibly be an investigation of the 2010 malware worm known as Stuxnet, but over its swift-moving 116-minute runtime, Gibney does a much broader and more important job: relating the rather airless, abstract concepts of cyber-terrorism and internet espionage to their real-world consequences.

Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.

You’ll want to see Zero Days — just not when you’re counting on a good night’s sleep a few hours later. Alex Gibney’s documentary about cyberwarfare is many things, none of them lulling: a thriller, a detective procedural, a startling chronicle of science fiction transformed into fact, and an urgent plea for public discussion of a new way of waging war that could wreak havoc on a scale akin to that of nuclear weapons.