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Scottsboro: An American Tragedy
Metascore
74 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 8 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 8
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 8
  3. Negative: 0 out of 8
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  1. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jami Bernard
    100
    Film makers Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker dig deep into the story and its ramifications, exposing how the twin evils of racism and anti-Semitism combined to foment institutional injustice, and led — if a silver lining could be found — to the triumphs of the civil-rights movement two and three decades later.
  2. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    80
    Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker have done a tremendous job of sorting the facts from a tangle of fictions, and include perspectives from a wide variety of experts and testimonies from a surprising number of surviving eyewitnesses. Together, they do the whole, horrible episode justice, something awfully hard to come by in the state of Alabama in 1931.
  3. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    80
    The first full-scale documentary about the history of those years, and it lays out lucidly the involvement of the Communist Party in the young men's defense and the ways in which the trials, against the backdrop of the Depression, replayed the murderous quarrels of the Civil War all over again.
  4. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    80
    The filmmakers know how potent the material is, and they don't hammer away at the obvious.
  5. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    75
    All emerge as vivid historical figures in this lucid account.
  6. New York Post
    Reviewed by: V.A. Musetto
    75
    A well-researched picture of how racism led to nine men being falsely accused and wrongly convicted. One only wishes that the filmmakers had more than 84 minutes in which to tell the story.
  7. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Amy Taubin
    70
    Goodman and Anker adroitly shape a cohesive drama out of a complicated history.
  8. Mr. Showbiz
    Reviewed by: Michael Atkinson
    52
    As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.
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