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75Worth seeing, both for the ways it's timeless and for the ways it encapsulates an era.
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83If there's one thing missing, it's a sense of purposeful, immediate outrage. You can't help but wonder why this film wasn't made 20 years ago, when it could have saved these men some time behind bars.
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88If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.
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88An unusually good documentary about an outlandish miscarriage of justice.
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88The case transfixed a racially polarized New York City. The teens were labeled as a "wolf pack" by the news media, led by the New York tabloids.
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80Central Park is at first discomforting, then enraging, then illuminating.
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91What we do see, among much else that is damning, are archival NYPD videotapes of the boys being interrogated by detectives who press them to implicate one another in exchange for a leniency that never materialized.
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80It projects equal parts fury and despair as it reveals how a particular group of individuals was caught in the unforgiving gears of the criminal justice system.
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80It's a different city today, in a country that sees its racial and social divides with more clarity than it did back then. But the most troubling question the film raises is how clearly we may see even now.
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75This is a movie about a rush to judgment in a city on edge, and it never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless.
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90Its greatest advantage over the book is that this is a story well-documented in moving pictures. In addition to recent interviews with the five, the filmmakers deftly marshal news footage, clips from the supposed confessions, and trenchant analysis.
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70Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness. It's also frustrating because while it re-examines the assault on the jogger and painstakingly walks you through what happened to the teenagers - from their arrest through their absolution - it fails to add anything substantively new.
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50Ultimately fails to make its case that five teenagers were sent to jail for a crime they didn't commit solely because of institutional racism.
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83This patient, righteous documentary by Ken Burns, David McMahon, and Sarah Burns recounts the story of justice undone (a serial rapist confessed) with extensive interviews, a thorough use of archival footage, and a less-than felicitous use of ominous-rumble music that unnecessarily insists, Isn't this an outrage?
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Nov 20, 201280Because the filmmakers were unable to enlist anyone from the NYPD or the DA's office to participate, we are left with the sense that mistakes of this magnitude require those in error to hide from them.
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80The attention to detail is fine-grained, especially on the slippery slope of plea bargaining. Missing are two pieces that might have turned this into an urban classic.
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91With an editing approach that seamlessly blends past and present, Central Park Five contains a fluid, engaging storytelling that does away with the dry voiceover commentary and theatrical music choices that typically account for the narrative flow of most Burns films.
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Nov 19, 201280Mixing a breathtaking array of archival materials with new talking-head interviews, the film analyzes the monumental miscarriage of justice repped by the 1989 Central Park Jogger case.
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63Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.
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Nov 16, 201280A meticulously reported chronicle of a case that shook New York in 1989 and remains a mark of shame on the city ten years after the convictions were vacated, the film incisively documents a travesty of justice that echoes the infamous Scottsboro Boys railroading of the 1930s.