‘Icarus: The Aftermath’ Review: Doping Doc Sequel Zooms Out to Confront the Real Issue

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Most of the time, documentaries don’t get sequels, which is strange. Unlike their scripted fiction counterparts, the story doesn’t end when the cameras stop rolling.

If you’ve ever attended a filmmaker Q&A after the screening of a great documentary, you know the first question from the audience is almost inevitably either “What’s happened since?” or “Where are they now?” Bryan Fogel must have heard that more times than he can count in the five years since his game-changing Russian sports doping doc “Icarus” won the Academy Award. “Icarus: The Aftermath” is his response, a daring and sure-to-be-divisive movie that’s even more shocking than the 2017 original, even if the big news is already out of the bag. “The Aftermath” follows Russian whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov — former head of the Russian anti-doping agency RUSADA — for five years, embedding itself in the paranoid new reality that awaits him in the West after revealing inside knowledge of the elaborate conspiracy by the Russian sports establishment to cover up their use of performance enhancing drugs.

Incredible and enraging in equal doses, the project plays like a tense spy thriller as Rodchenkov is assigned a security team and shuffled from one safe house to another, while enemies of the state — Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny — are poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok.

In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that Fogel got the scoop in the first place. The point of his original documentary had been broader: to demonstrate that pretty much anyone could fool a doping test. “Icarus” was conceived as a “Super Size Me”-style stunt, of which Fogel planned to serve as his own guinea pig, taking the drugs himself and finding a