Thanks to the likes of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, documentaries are now the stuff of major cinema releases and major release documentaries are made about anything these days (sushi master chefs (Jiro Dreams of Sushi); peculiar shared-interest groups ("Tickle"); daring feats ("Man On Wire"), personal stories from around the world ("The Eagle Huntress"), etc..), so surely The Church of Scientology wasn't surprised when yet another documentary maker, this time the irritating man-boy reporter, Louis Theroux, knocked on the door wanting to apply his dopey (and I've always found patronising and not very penetrating) drawl to the task of finding out about the famously secretive organisation, but the church does seem surprised and even enraged, defensive from the get-go, and the resulting documentary is equal parts disturbing (for showing there to exist yet more factions of people in the world that remain committed to never seeing eye-to-eye), bewildering (it presents a long string of disturbing but disputed facts via reenactment, much of it rehashed from other more forensic sources, with Theroux unable to uncover much exact, undisputed information except for, say, whether a particular stretch of road is public or private) and stupefying (it beggars belief how members of a driven, supposedly super-media-savvy church can't see beyond its outrage to at least check its behaviour in front of Theroux's cameras - its representatives on camera are childish, bullish, and outright peculiar to the point you wonder if they are just more of Theroux's actor stand-ins).
★★★☆☆
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