95% West of Memphis

All Critics (106) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (101) | Rotten (5)

A real-life horror story, made no less shocking by the familiarity of its early scenes.

While the "Paradise Lost" films captured events as they unfolded in the heat of battle, "West of Memphis" has the luxury of at least partial closure.

A true-crime story that begins with a notorious murder case and grows into a chilling indictment of the American justice system.

And justice for all? Hardly.

It tells the story of a terrible crime compounded by a grave injustice that's been remedied, but only in part, so it's impossible to have a single or simple response to the movie.

What sets this film apart from previous efforts to document the story is that Jackson and Walsh financed a private investigative team with legal and forensic experts who re-examined old evidence, conducted new interviews and found new witnesses.

The film is so utterly transfixing you won't believe almost two-and-a-half hours have passed when the final credits roll.

We feel like we're watching an overlong true-crime television episode and not a movie.

I would have preferred Jackson's clinically-presented project display a bit more reverence for the three young lives that were brutally taken some twenty years ago.

Moving and gruesome, West of Memphis is an eloquent disquisition on the banality of evil.

"West of Memphis" re-examines evidence and retells the story in a methodical and procedural fashion in which even the false steps lead somewhere.

More a recap and appendix to the Paradise Lost trilogy... one can't help but feel that the celebrities involved needed this document of their efforts to appease their vanity.

The case is more intriguing than the film about it.

Isn't unnecessary, but it's often superfluous.

The film suggests these powerless, poorly educated young men were scapegoated because they would be missed by nobody of importance -- the justice system equivalent of the cannon fodder recruited from the same socioeconomic straits.

It's nice to have all the twists and turns of the iconic case contained tidily in one well-crafted film, although there are no real revelations here.

"West of Memphis" becomes a greatest-hits concert of prosecutorial misconduct, and you'll agree when the film asserts that prosecutors knew they had the wrong guys.

Incredibly, after three documentaries on the subject, there are still things to reveal about the West Memphis Three.

"West of Memphis" does nothing to displace its predecessor films as masterpieces of investigative filmmaking, but complements them as a riveting capstone to an epic and tragic tale.

West of Memphis is the real vindication - even if it is incomplete.

In the end it won't matter if this is the fourth movie about the same subject; you can never learn its lessons often enough.

West of Memphis caps off the Paradise Lost/West Memphis Three saga with a line up full of perpetrators including the media, the West Memphis PD, the legal establishment and suspect gift wrapped with a smoking gun.

Injustice in West Memphis, Arkansas

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/west_of_memphis/

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