Spy or whistleblower? Oliver Stone comes down clearly on the side of the latter assessment in Snowden, the triple Oscar winner’s best film in decades.

Stone, never one to shrink from controversy, has always been at his best when underscoring the humanity in his characters rather than their behavioral eccentricities. That was particularly true in the films for which he won his Oscars, the 1978 Turkish prison exposé Midnight Express, for which he wrote the screenplay, but didn’t direct; 1986’s Platoon, which told the story of the Vietnam War from a grunt’s perspective for the first time; and 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, the biography of war hero turned anti-war protestor Ron Kovic. It was also true in the two films for which he was nominated for Oscars, but didn’t win, 1991’s JFK and 1995’s Nixon, but not in his last film about a former U.S. President, 2008’s W.

There have been other films about Edward Snowden, the former CIA and NASA intelligence officer who served as a subject matter expert on technology and cybersecurity, most notably the 2014 Oscar-winning documentary, CitizenFour, but this is the first dramatized version of his story.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Walk) turns in another fine performance as a real-life character, taking Snowden from patriotic soldier to concerned citizen over a ten-year period. His girlfriend, played by Shailene Woodley, is an anti-war protestor when they meet in an internet chat room, and although the two never really mesh politically, they do romantically as she gives up career opportunities to follows him wherever his government jobs take him. It isn’t until Snowden gets to his job with the NSA in Hawaii that he and we get to see the full extent of government surveillance into private citizens’ business. The theme of the film seems to be that we are all being watched on our computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices even as we watch the film.

Melissa Leo is the documentary filmmaker, Zachary Quinto the Guardian reporter, and Tom Wilkinson the Guardian’s intelligence reporter with whom Snowden meets in Hong Kong to make his findings public. Timothy Olyphant, Nicolas Cage, and Scott Eastwood are among the other players.

Snowden is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Extras include a Q&A following the film’s New York opening with Stone, Gordon-Levitt, and Woodley on stage along with Snowden himself via Skype.

Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof) makes a welcome return with The Dressmaker, her first film in 18 years. Kate Winslet stars as a woman who was sent away from her small Australian town to a boarding school as a child for having murdered another child, a crime of which she was innocent. Back after twenty years and a successful fashion career in London, Milanb and Paris, she sets out to find the truth of what happened on that day long ago.

Gorgeously costumed, Winslet has never looked better on screen. Filmed mostly in soft, flattering light, you don’t question the fact that Liam Hemsworth, the local farmer who is her lover in the film, is supposed to be the same age, but is in real life – noticeably fifteen years younger.

Set in 1950, a highlight of the film is the playing of then-new LP’s of Broadway smash hits South Pacific and Oklahoma!, although the soundtrack listing on IMDb says that the excerpts played are from the respective 1958 and 1955 film versions, not the original cast recordings. If so, it’s a small faux pas in an otherwise perfectly done period piece.

Although classified as a drama, The Dressmaker is often hilarious, some of its best jokes coming just before it turns tragic. The acting is superb from Winslet to Judy Davis as her broken mother to Hemsworth to Hugo Weaving as a cross-dressing lawman to Kerry Fox as a malevolent schoolteacher, and on down the line. It’s a little gem well worth catching.

The Dressmaker is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Universal, which has been slow to release its deep catalogue of Universal and pre-1949 Paramount films, continues to make up for lost time. Among their most recent releases are the 1931 Paramount crime drama City Streets and four 1948 films: Paramount’s So Evil My Love, and Universal’s A Woman’s Vengeance, Another Part of the Forest, and An Act of Murder.

Rouben Mamoulian made City Streets between Applause and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and although it has its moments, it’s nowhere as good as either of those two classics. The film is obviously pre-code in that it is morally ambiguous with Gary Cooper, Sylvia Sidney, Paul Lukas, Guy Kibbee, William “Stage” Boyd, and Wynne Gibson winking at crime and sex throughout, but it is extremely tame for a gangster movie that came out at the same time as William Wellman’s The Public Enemy with James Cagney in his star-making role and that famous grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face.

Lewis Allen’s So Evil My Love from Paramount’s British Studios gives us Ann Todd as a missionary doctor’s widow turned criminal by conniving conman Ray Milland. Loosely based on two turn-of-the-century real-life murders, it’s a nifty little thriller with Geraldine Fitzgerald, Leo G. Carroll, Martita Hunt, and Finlay Currie also in the cast.

Zoltan Korda’s A Woman’s Vengeance gives Charles Boyer solo billing over the title as a man accused of murdering his wife (Rachel Kempson), but as the title suggests, it was a woman who did it. Was it Ann Blyth, Jessica Tandy, or Mildred Natwick? Can you figure it out before Sir Cedric Hardwicke does, or they hang the suave Frenchman? Probably!

Michael Gordon’s Another Part of the Forest, based on Lillian Hellman’s play, is a prequel to Hellman’s The Little Foxes with Ann Blyth, Edmond O’Brien, Dan Duryea, and Betsy Blair as the characters later played by Bette Davis, Charles Dingle, Carl Benton Reid, and Patricia Collinge. The evil father is played by Fredric March in a rare villainous role with Mrs. March, Florence Eldredge, playing the befuddled mother. It stands on its own, but is probably more satisfying if you’re familiar with the original.

An Act of Murder, also directed by Michael Gordon, reunites March, Eldredge, and O’Brien, this time joined by Geraldine Brooks as an early treatise on euthanasia or mercy killing as it’s referred to in the film. March is the respected judge who turns himself in for killing his terminally ill wife (Eldredge), but did he? This is 1948, so what do you think? Brooks is their daughter, and O’Brien her fiancé, a lawyer who March doesn’t like. Eldredge steals it!

A bit of trivia: director Gordon (Pillow Talk) was Snowden star Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s grandfather.

This week’s new releases include Denial and Middle School.