The Central Park Five Reviews
Top CriticIt's a vivid and gripping documentary (although, at two hours, somewhat longer than it needs to be), a grave indictment of a city and a system at the breaking point.
Expect your blood pressure to rise during The Central Park Five.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The doc is rife with smart or wrenching or shameful moments. The fresh interviews with the accused, now men, are invaluable.
As grim a portrait of the criminal justice system as can be imagined.
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| Original Score: B+
How could this second crime have occurred? The film asks that question but only partly answers it, and in the process it raises an even more troubling one.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"The Central Park Five" is worth seeing, both for the ways it's timeless and for the ways it encapsulates an era.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
What's amazing about listening to them speak now, often through tears, is the absence of bitterness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
You'll notice something odd as you watch and your anger rises at the injustice of it all: The anger of the wrongly convicted does not.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The film offers a snapshot of the white hysteria then gripping the city, which was stoked by the tabloids and resulted in police and prosecutors railroading five black youths into prison.
An unusually good documentary about an outlandish miscarriage of justice.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Involves a detailed reconstruction of how the story broke, was developed and was dramatized by lurid tabloid headlines.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Central Park is at first discomforting, then enraging, then illuminating.
What she and her father and husband have drawn from this material is a combustible amalgam: a movie about justice violated, rectified, and denied.
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| Original Score: A-
A careful, thoughtful documentary that meticulously re-creates what happened on that night and details how and why everything went so terribly off-course.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Watching "The Central Park Five" is a deeply affecting experience.
A skillfully told and important story, though less factual blow-by-blow and more time spent with the five would have been more compelling.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Even as "The Central Park Five" seeks satisfactory answers, it stirs outrage and discouragement all over again.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's still chilling to see how easily "The Central Park Five" evokes those mad days of urban distrust.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
In addition to recent interviews with the five, the filmmakers deftly marshal news footage, clips from the supposed confessions, and trenchant analysis.
Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
"The Central Park Five" ultimately fails to make its case that five teenagers were sent to jail for a crime they didn't commit solely because of institutional racism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This effort is required viewing for anyone content to remember a dangerous town from afar.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The central power of the film comes from hearing the accused finally telling their own stories.
It's a troubling film, but it's well done and thought-provoking.
A gripping investigative docu from co-directors Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon.
The film incisively documents a travesty of justice that echoes the infamous Scottsboro Boys railroading of the 1930s.
