

“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.
