compassionate and sobering
Comment
10/19/06
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
94
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:49
Fresh:46
Rotten:3
Average Rating:7.5/10
Consensus: Director Stanley Nelson avoids editorializing and sensationalizing in Jonestown, letting the CIA photos and film speak for themselves, and giving a voice to the surviving victims.
Theatrical Release:Oct 20, 2006 Limited
Synopsis: With previously unseen footage and interviews with former members of the Peoples Church, this documentary explores the events leading up to the Jonestown Massacre in 1978. A cult which developed a... [More]
Director: Stanley Nelson
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Reviews for Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
Jonestown is not an easy movie to watch. But it's a solid presentation of an important chapter in American and religious history. Haunting is the only word that truly fits.
12/08/06
Top CriticThe last half hour of Jonestown is almost unwatchable. Video footage of the assault on the congressman's delegation gives way to audio of Jones exhorting people to 'die with a degree of dignity' as children shriek in the background.
01/12/07
Top CriticRelying on previously unseen film footage, still photos and voice recordings, Jonestown paints a portrait of a fantastically charismatic preacher.
12/22/06
More than a record of one horrific moment in history or the cautionary tale of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
11/15/06
A gripping, provocative documentary.
10/14/06
... riveting documentary ...
11/30/06
Top CriticJonestown is a thoroughly conventional documentary...But this familiar format also emphasizes the movie's universality.
11/24/06
Top CriticAs much as it leaves open individual questions of devotion and need, the film does make clear the dangers of seeking solace and identity in the embrace of such a complex ego.
02/24/07
When it comes to how those followers turned into a zombie Kool-Aid death cult, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple leaves you with more questions than you went in with.
10/18/06
Top Critic...A documentary that sheds light on the horror while giving voice to the survivors.
10/20/06
A disturbing and provocative portrait of the doomed cult and its warped leader
10/17/06
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple provides lethal evidence of what becomes of those who deposit their sincerity into the command of a religious lunatic.
10/17/06
A conventional but genuinely heartrending exposé... the calamity is made real and terrible and important to hear about in this definitive account.
04/27/06
Ending with mass suicide in deepest Guyana, the story of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple is both the death rattle of '60s utopianism and -- predicated on the desire to found a New Jerusalem in the wilderness -- a very American saga.
10/17/06
Top CriticThis film paints a portrait of Mr. Jones, who died with his flock in Guyana, as a man with two faces.
10/19/06
Top CriticA somber, solid documentary [parading] the whole bleak tale before us again, complete with those disturbing scenes of hundreds of corpses in their tees and shorts and flip-flops strewn about facedown in the mud of Jonestown, Guyana.
02/01/07
Top CriticThe film says just as much about the state of American politics, the emergence of a mass media and the perceived sanctity of religion as it does about one of the world’s lesser-known demagogues.
10/30/06
One of the year's most important documentaries, a real must-see.
11/03/06
Top CriticStanley Nelson revisits the 1978 mass suicide of Jim Jones and his flock in Guyana, savoring the horror but offering no new insights.
04/01/07
Top CriticLatest News for Jonestown: The Life and Death of...
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