Icarus

Icarus is a documentary about doping in sport, made by the American filmmaker Bryan Fogel. Fogel, an amateur cyclist, set out to see whether he could use performance-enhancing drugs and still pass the usual tests, and he sought advice from Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian scientist who ran his country's anti-doping laboratory. What began as a personal experiment turned into something much larger once Rodchenkov described how doping was organised at state level in Russia. The two men worked together at a distance while the scientist's position became increasingly dangerous, and the story widened into an international scandal with consequences for Russian athletes.

The film is built around Fogel himself and Rodchenkov, with appearances by the cyclist Dave Zabriskie and the anti-doping researcher Don Catlin, among others. Mark Monroe and Timothy Rode wrote it with Fogel, and Dan Cogan, Jim Swartz and Fogel produced it. It is the second of the three features Fogel has directed, between Jewtopia and The Dissident.

It runs 121 minutes and was released in 2017. On IMDb it holds 7.9 from around 58,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.6 from roughly 859 votes, both above the critics' average of 7.1 from 49 reviews, so audiences have rated it slightly more warmly than reviewers did.