Billion Dollar Heist review – cybercrime documentary relives tech chaos

A hit-and-miss documentary often struggles to explain the hows and whys of the Bangladesh Central Bank cyber heist of 2016

Cybercrime, on top of being difficult to detect and even more so to prove, is notoriously tricky to visualize. The impact may be tangible, even devastating - nuclear plants damaged, hospitals disabled, pipelines shut down - but the perpetrators are shadowy and inscrutable, the crime unseen and insidious, the methods vague and indecipherable to lay people without a knack for computer science.

Billion Dollar Heist, a new feature-length documentary, attempts the formidable challenge of turning one of the biggest financial crimes in history - the February 2016 cyber heist of $81m from the US Federal Reserve accounts for the central bank of Bangladesh - into informative entertainment. Director Daniel Gordon employs a range of cinematic techniques - some illuminative, some overly cliched - to get at a highly sophisticated cyber crime involving several countries, time zones and financial institutions. Among them: animation, dramatic recreation, stock footage of beeping ones and zeros, archival footage on the relatively brief history of hacking, ominous narration from British broadcaster and cybersecurity journalist Misha Glenny.