Absolutely mind blowing film. A documentary that shatters your sense of reality with nothing but the truth that strikes to the core.

Well this is two hours of my life I will not get back. Also, another 15 minutes I will not get back after writing this review to warn other unsuspecting docuphiles out there. This is a terrible, bumbling, mess of a documentary. Every Doc has a bias and some are better at hiding those biases than others. Icarus charges ahead, intelligence left behind in the dust. The film NEVER mounts an argument or even attempts to show the bigger picture. Russia is bad. The USA stops bad. End of Doc. The irony is completely lost on them just how many times U.S athletes have been found guilty of doping. Lance Armstrong is mentioned in passing, seriously. Watch another film an save your brain cells. DO NOT WATCH!

Very interesting documentary. Had me hooked from the beginning. The film maker got extrememly lucky and was able to cover a worldwide incident from the front row.

Film-maker and amateur cyclist Bryan Fogel had a not-very-interesting idea for a movie. He would show how doping could improve a cyclist's performance - and how anti-doping labs were hopeless at catching the cheats - by using himself as a subject. The first part of 'Icarus' isn't so good, to be honest - Fogel is neither particularly charming nor informative as a character is his own film, and the narrative is spoiled when, in spite of taking all the drugs, he doesn't manage to bring home the bacon when racing. But for the second part of his mission, he had sought the help of the retired head of the U.S. anti-doping laboratories, who had some ideas about how athletes has dodged his testing regimen. When he got cold feet about being involved in the film, he suggested an alternative collaborator: Grigory Rodchenkov, the current head of the offical Russian laboratory.From the start, Rodchenkov seems to have a strange attitude to the project. You might thing he would be reluctant to show how his day-job is useless; instead, he approaches the project with a strange mixture of enthusiasm and business-as-usual. And then, as the film was being made, a scandal broke over his head. It turned out that, as well as running the lab, he was routinely helping Russian athletes to cheat his own test. The documentary project, as it happened, perfectly mirrored his normal working life. Quite why he was willing to participate, and draw attention to himself, is unclear; perhaps he just considered himself invulnerable. After all, he was usuallly not freelancing, but working at the direction of senior figures in the Russian state. Which made the scandal uniquely dangerous for him.The ending: Rodchenkov flees to the United States. He aids the authorities, but is separated from his family, and has perhaps good reason to fear for his own life. Russia gets banned from the Olympics, but the decision is at least partially rescinded; power and money trump justice. The film has a decided anti-Russian slant, and with good reason, but my fear is that the athletes from most other countries are little better (after all, Fogel was orginally inspired by the Lance Armstrong story), even if there's less in the way of official backing. In the end, the bizarre and flamboyant character of Rodchenkov makes the film, and a more interesting film surely than the one Fogel was expecting to make. But you couldn't call it a happy story.