It’s a grabber of an introductory moment and quite the scene-setter, and it’s illustrative of Mr. No matter how deliberate his manner, the very mention of radical Islam and especially of Jonestown - in which more than 900 followers of Jim Jones committed suicide or were murdered - serves as powerful shorthand for ideas, real or received, about the perils of faith. Wright’s sober, measured screen presence makes a sharp, dissonant contrast to his reference to both radical Islam and Jonestown, words that cut through his delivery like Klaxon horns. You know, my goal wasn’t to write an exposé it was simply to understand Scientology, trying to understand what people get out of it, you know, why do they go into it in the first place.” “They’re oftentimes good-hearted people, idealistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty that eliminates doubt. “I’ve studied Jonestown, radical Islam,” Mr. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker who functions as the movie’s leading voice of reason and rationality, explains that he’s always been interested in religions and beliefs.

“Scientology is such a subject of fascination for people,” Mr. Soon into Alex Gibney’s investigative documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” you hear him lob a question at Lawrence Wright, the author of the 2013 nonfiction book the movie is based on.

Going clear book