Bill Condon's film follows the trail of Daniel Domscheit-Bergs, who founded WikiLeaks with Julian Assange.

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German IT specialist Daniel Domscheit-Berg is so impressed by Australian network activist Julian Assange and his battle for transparency that he joins WikiLeaks after meeting Assange at the Chaos Computer Club. Together they establish a network platform on which whistleblowers can publish secret documents anonymously. Soon WikiLeaks is getting all kinds of attention for the information it distributes, incurring the wrath of governments and companies worldwide. But when the site receives the largest ever amount of leaked documents from a US marine, whose identity is revealed, the resulting conflict threatens both WikiLeaks itself and the friendship between its two founders.

Julian Assange is without question an important figure of our times, and is fascinating and polarizing enough to carry an entire film. His battle for transparency has unleashed a political and social debate that continues to make waves. But although Bill Condon picked Benedict Cumberbatch as the ideal actor for this role, he doesn't expand the story beyond the facts already known. And so Assange continues to be a mystery – and The Fifth Estate is disappointingly indecisive.