In January 2013, Laura Poitras started receiving anonymous encrypted emails from ‘Citizenfour’, who claimed to have evidence of illegal covert surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) in collaboration with other intelligence agencies worldwide. Five months later she, with reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, flew to Hong Kong to meet the man who turned out to be the now infamous Edward Snowden. Citizenfour tells the story of the interview and international reaction to Snowden’s revelations.

If you’re looking to find out what the NSA is up to, this isn’t your best bet. The strength of the film is Snowden as a person. The documentary works on various levels: it is an engaging introduction for those casually aware of the story; it brings many elements together if you’ve been following the story; and if you aren’t a fan of documentaries there are moments where you can’t help but be pulled into what feels a bit like a fictional political thriller (but without the gunmen or Harrison Ford!).

I’m used to watching documentaries about famous musicians or moments in history from decades ago. It was interesting to see this real time documentary focussed on the decisions of a man who changed the way many people think about our increasingly cluttered, confusing and crazy world. Whether Snowden is a hero or a villain, brave or a coward, this is definitely a thought-provoking film, so make sure to factor in drinks and ‘debate’ with friends after the credits roll.

In 1897, J. J. Thomson used cathode rays to prove the existence of the first subatomic particle: the electron. By the 1970s physicists had enough information to form the standard model: that all matter and forces of the universe are built from just seventeen fundamental particles. By 1987 all but one theoretically predicted particle had been discovered. But cathode ray tubes no longer cut it: detecting the holdout would require constructing an incredibly powerful particle accelerator in the biggest scientific experiment in human history.

This documentary covers the events leading up to discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Its 27 kilometrs of underground corridors, tens of thousands of scientists and five-story detection apparatuses makes for an awesome sight: truly our generation’s Apollo project. But exploring inner space creates the challenge of a decidedly non-visual story. Ideas of supersymmetry, dark matter, and the multiverse hypothesis are covered, but the movie focuses on the human drama and the tension when the LHC fails to perform as expected under the scrutiny of the world’s media. Economics intrude: we see philistine American congressmen angrily shut down the US’s rival accelerator, citing the obscene cost.

But they have a point: when challenged about its practical uses, theorist David Kaplan happily confesses there may be none whatsoever. This science looks like experimental religion, with physicists hoping to discern, in a cryptic spectrometer trace, the handwriting of God.