Edward Snowden according to Oliver Stone

From Steven Rea's

"On Movies Online"

philly.com/onmovies

The presumptive front-runner in the best documentary feature race in the 2015 Academy Awards, Laura Poitras' Citizenfour offers a gripping, you-are-there account of security contractor Edward Snowden's fateful decision to share top-secret intelligence files with the media and the world at large. A whistle-blower or a traitor, depending on who you're talking to, Snowden has a story that's the stuff of a gripping international thriller.

Now, Oliver Stone, the director with a string of controversial takes on recent American history - JFK, Nixon, W., World Trade Center - plans to bring the Snowden story to the big screen.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been cast as Snowden, the intelligence and security contractor who holes up in a Hong Kong hotel while Poitras films him angsting over the release of documents, as investigative reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill look on.

Joining Gordon-Levitt in Stone's dramatization - adapted from the books Time of the Octopus by Snowden's Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, and The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man, by Luke Harding - are Shailene Woodley as Snowden's longtime girlfriend, Lindsay Mills; Melissa Leo as filmmaker Poitras; Zachary Quinto (Spock in the Star Trek reboots) as Greenwald, and Tom Wilkinson as British journalist MacAskill.

Expect a 2016 release.